They Came Like Swallows (7 page)

PEACE AT LAST

Bunny deciphered the headlines of the morning paper, upside down.

“Is that what all the noise is about?”

“Of course. What did you think?” Robert was almost unbearably superior.

“I didn’t know. I thought maybe it was a fire.”

“A fire! Listen to him. He didn’t even know the Armistice is signed!”

Bunny looked to his mother for enlightenment. The word ‘Armistice’ was new to him, and he felt reasonably certain that Robert didn’t know what it meant, any more than he did.

“It means
King’s
X,” she said.

“It means we beat the Germans,” Robert said. He got up from the table and a moment later they heard the front door slam. Robert had gone to join the excitement.

His mother drew him to her. “Haven’t you forgotten something?”

Hair? Teeth? Face and hands? He forgot to kiss her … In the night someone bent over him where he lay sleeping. Someone put Araminta Culpepper in his arms. She must have … Bunny saw that his father was waiting for their attention.

“You might listen to this, son. You might like to remember it when you’re grown.”

But instead of listening to the military terms of the armistice with Germany, Bunny went and put his head in his mother’s lap, for he felt very odd inside of him. He heard her say, “James, this child is burning up with fever!” and he thought dreamily that it must be so. I’m going to be sick, he thought, grateful for the cool hand on his forehead and her nearness. And after that, life was no longer uncertain or incomplete.

The grass under their feet was trampled and flattened down unevenly. They were hoarse from shouting. They knelt with their hands braced, with their toes balancing. Between their legs they saw the unstable sky

Nine …
Sixteen …
Thirty-seven …
and the roofs of houses.
Offside
Offside
Sixty-four …
Offside
Hunderd-and-eighteen-shift
Watch it now
All right
WATCH it
All right
WATCH IT

They ran with knees high and trees spinning. The grey light of evening touched their foreheads, their thin dirt-drawn cheeks, their hands. Crying words, crying names, they fell together—impact of back and shoulder, down, on unknown thighs and the hard ground.

It’s your turn to kick off
All right
It’s your turn
Three …
Seventeen …
Thirty-eight …
McCarty’s offside
Forty-seven …
Hang on to it
Hang on to it
Oh …
Do you stink, Northway

Into the clear circle of their voices Robert went, limping—McCarty’s voice. Northway’s voice, taut and protesting. The sky enclosed his shoulders.

Ah
Don’t kick it
No
Knock a guy out doing that
What
Fooling like that
Come on
Come on, Morison, pass it
PASS it

Robert was thrown to the ground, alive and breathing.

Touchdown
Listen, after this …
Touchdown
It’s not, either
For our side
Cryin’ out loud
Touchdown
When
Time out I said
When did you
When

Robert picked himself up off the ground and adjusted the knees of his knickerbockers. Not gradually but all at once it was getting dark. He drew his sweater on over his head, weaving argument into it, and denial. They were going home now. Matthews and Scully and Northway and Berryhill (with the ball between his knees) and Engle and McCarty.

So long, McCarty
See you tomorrow
So long
Whose cap is this
So long
Somebody lost his cap
See you tomorrow I said
And don’t forget
See you tomorrow

The sky hung down, dark and heavy upon the trees. Robert straddled his bicycle and with Irish between the handlebars left the field, riding now on the sidewalk and now in the street, which was old and full of unexpected hollows. The front wheel of his bicycle turned this way and that, jolting them,

“We should have had that touchdown,” Irish said.

“By rights we should have had it, but what can you expect?”

Though it was Robert’s bicycle, Matthews or McCarty or Berryhill would have offered to do the pedaling. They took it for granted that Robert wanted them to do the pedaling, on account of his leg. Irish never did. When it was time to go home he came and settled himself between the handle-bars.

After the third long block the car tracks ended and there was level pavement. Street-lights went on at all the intersections. And houses withdrew beyond the rim of the fierce swinging light. Robert, turning, saw the shadow of his head and shoulders lag behind, saw leaves scattering….

After the one-story house of old Miss Talmadge came the Bakers’ and the McIntyres’ and the Lloyds’, then the driveway at the side of Irish’s house, and the front walk. Irish got down.

“See you tomorrow.”

“Sure, and thank your mother for lunch.” “Sure,” Irish said.

There was a light in the kitchen window, but the rest of Irish’s house was dark and uninhabitable.

“So long,” Robert said.

Irish waited for some leaves to blow past.

“So long.”

Through one last street lamp Robert rode alone—the shadow of his wheels elongated, preceding him. Beyond Miss Brew’s and the Mitchells’ and the Koenigs’ (beyond the unseen, undreamed-of darkness) was home: the porch light and the front door, the white pillars along the front of the porch, and Old John waiting in the shadows to greet him.

“How are you, huh? How’s the boy?”

Old John wagged in a slow difficult circle, his head and hind quarters and the tip of his tail.

“How’s the boy, huh?”

Robert slanted his bicycle against the steps and then, opening the front door, passed into the circumscribed region of the front hall, Irene saw him at once, and started toward him.

“Look out, now.” Robert gave her fair warning. “You’ll get in trouble!”

If he pretended to go right and went instead to the left, he could always get by his mother. But with Irene it was not so easy.

“Look out, your own self!”

He charged straight at her and was caught, before
he could get away. She bent her face down, smothering him.

Standing in the door to the library, his father said, “It is vitally important to keep her out of that boy’s room. ‘Tie her down,’ Dr. Macgregor said, ‘if you can’t keep her out any other way.’”

Robert found suddenly that he was free.

He pulled off his cap and his outermost sweater. He would go now and stand beside his father, who did not subject him to these humiliating displays of affection. Irene knew he didn’t like to be kissed. She only did it for meanness…. Robert was confused. The noise of the playing-field was still in his ears, ringing. When he hitched up his knickerbockers, Irene did likewise with her skirt.

“Where’s Bunny?” he said, and made a face at her.

“He’s sick.” It was his father who answered him. “What’s the matter?”

“Spanish influenza,” his mother said, coming toward them from the dining-room. Robert turned his eyes away. She was getting big around the waist, on account of the baby coming. He didn’t mean to look, but sometimes he did, anyway, and it embarrassed her.

“If I’d only had sense enough,” she exclaimed—not to them but to herself, apparently. “If I’d only taken Bunny out of school when the epidemic first started!”

The room seemed very bright to Robert, after being out-of-doors. He could feel the heat from the fireplace through his clothes.

“You can’t be taking the boy out of school every time somebody in town gets sick.”

“Robert, your hands—” By the way that his mother spoke to him, it was plain that she had not been listening. She roused herself. “You can wash out in the kitchen. Run along now … I want to slip upstairs for a minute.”

Irene was in the doorway before her.

“I’ll go, Bess.”

“Thank you just the same, but—”

“I think you’d better let Irene go.” His father spoke hurriedly and as if he were not altogether sure that he would be obeyed. Through heat and brightness Robert turned to look at his mother, who would not mind now whether he looked at her or not.

“Why?” she asked.

“Doctor’s orders. You’re to keep out of Bunny’s room.”

“But, James, how ridiculous!”

“That’s what he said.”

While his mother was still hesitating between anger and her original intention, Sophie appeared in the doorway. Sophie had a white apron on. And it seemed to Robert that she and the little brass clock on the mantel struck in unison.

“Dinner,” they announced, “is ready.”

Robert was awakened by a blow at the side of the house. With sleep still hanging to him, he raised himself tentatively on one elbow. It was daylight, and Karl’s head and shoulders appeared at the window.

“Wie geht’s?”

Karl had not spoken to any of them in German since America went into the war, and at first Robert could not answer him. He knew what the words meant, but he didn’t know where he was until he saw the sewing-machine and the wire form his mother used for dressmaking.

“Good, I guess … only I don’t like sleeping in this room.”

Karl shifted his ladder slightly and peered in through the screen. It was not safe, they said, for Robert to be in the same room with Bunny. And so they moved him in here, in the sewing-room, where he had never slept before. The stairs creaked long after everybody had gone to bed. And the shade snapping kept him awake.

“I have to, on Bunny’s account. He’s sick. Did Sophie tell you?”

Karl nodded, thoughtfully. “That is bad.” And then he smiled—a fine smile that ran off into the grain of his face.

“Soon I go back!” he said, shifting the ladder.

“Back where?”

“To the old country.”

“To Germany? Why are you going to do that?”

Balancing himself, Karl began to take down the screen.

“If you have not seen your father,” he said, “if you have not seen your mother, if you have not seen your brothers for seven year …”

For Karl to be a German was one thing, it seemed to Robert. That couldn’t be helped. But to want to go back there and be with a lot of other Germans was something else again. He yawned.

“How much will you take to close the window?”

With a great display of muscular effort, Karl managed to get the window down half an inch. Then he tucked the screen under his arm and withdrew out of sight. And there was consequently nothing that Robert could do about it, except to kick the covers off and close the window himself. While he dressed, he entertained himself by thinking of the time Aunt Eth came for a visit from Rockford. Irene was there, too. And it was her idea that they put a dress and a hat and a fur neckpiece on the wire dressmaking form and stand it at the head of the stairs to fool his father. Then they waited, snickering, behind the bedroom doors…. After the stump sock was on, Robert lifted his artificial leg from the chair, fitted his stump into it, and drew the straps in place over his shoulders. Then, partly standing, partly sitting down, he pulled his knickerbockers on.

Robert’s
affliction,
people said, when they thought he wasn’t listening.

The breakfast table was set before the fire in the library, as usual. Robert said good-morning to his mother, and to Irene, who was wearing a green silk kimono with yellow flowers on it. They were talking about Bunny.

“Hundred and two,” Irene said; “and he complains of pain in his eyes.”

Before he had time to unfold his napkin, she turned upon him.

“Stick out your tongue, Robert. I wouldn’t be at all surprised—Just as I thought: it’s red. It’s very red. You must be careful. Just see, Bess—”

But his mother was in no mood for joking. “Here’s the cereal,” she said, “and sugar and cream. Now shift for yourself.”

When Robert was halfway through breakfast there was a blow against the side of the house. He was not startled this time. With his mouth full of toast, he waited until Karl’s head and shoulders appeared at the library windows. Then he reflected by turns upon Karl, who was going to Germany; and upon Aunt Eth, who was not like his mother and not like Irene, but in a way rather like both of them. Only she had gray hair, and she was quieter than his mother even, and she taught school in Rockford. When she came to visit, she brought wonderful presents—marbles or a peachy ball-glove for him, and building blocks or a book or paints for Bunny.

Bunny was always either painting or making
something out of blocks. That was all he wanted apparently. He didn’t play baseball or marbles or anything that other kids liked to do. At recess time while they were playing games he stood off by himself, waiting for the bell to ring. And if anybody went up to him and started pestering him, instead of hitting back at them, he cried.

Bunny isn’t well,
his father said.
You have to be careful how you play with him. He isn’t as strong as you were when you were his age.
… He was careful, all right. But if he took Bunny out to the garage and they had a duel with longswords and daggers, the first crack over the knuckles would send Bunny on his way to the house, bawling. And if they played catch, it was the same thing. (Again the ladder struck, farther on. And Karl’s head appeared at the third window. When he was gone Robert reached for the last piece of bacon.) He would have preferred a more satisfactory kind of brother, but since Bunny was the only brother he had, he tried his best to be decent to him. For instance, when Bunny got over the flu he was going to take down his good soldiers from the top of the bookcase and let Bunny look at them.

From this intention he was distracted by his mother, who laid her hand on his sleeve.

“While I think of it, Robert—”

He got up from the table, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and on second thought with his napkin. Whenever his mother just remembered something at this time on a Tuesday morning, it was the clean clothes. They came on Saturday, but she never
got around to sorting them until it was time to send the soiled ones. If he stopped for Irish and got to school by eight-thirty, as he had promised Scully and Berryhill, he would have to hurry.