‘One does, does one?’ said Mr. Howard.
‘If you jump on a dead man’s grave, then you’re poisoned and fall down and die,’ explained Isabel Skelton, much too brightly.
‘Dead men, graves, poisoned,’ Mr. Howard said, mockingly. ‘Where do you get this dead man idea?’
‘See?’ said Clara Parris, pointing with her arithmetic. ‘On this square, the name of the two dead men.’
‘Ridiculous,’ retorted Mr. Howard, squinting down. ‘Those are simply the names of the contractors who mixed and laid the cement pavement.’
Isabel and Clara both gasped wildly and turned accusing eyes to the two boys. ‘You said they were gravestones!’ they cried, almost together.
William Arnold looked at his feet. ‘Yeah. They are. Well, almost. Anyway.’ He looked up. ‘It’s late. I gotta go home. So long.’
Clara Parris looked at the two little names cut into the pavement. ‘Mr. Kelly and Mr. Terrill,’ she read the names. ‘Then these aren’t graves? Mr. Kelly and Mr. Terrill aren’t buried here? See, Isabel, that’s what I told you, a dozen times I did.’
‘You did not,’ sulked Isabel.
‘Deliberate lies,’ Mr. Howard tapped his cane in an impatient code. ‘Falsification of the highest calibre. Good God, Mr. Arnold, Mr. Bowers, there’ll be no more of this, do you understand?’
‘Yes, sir,’ mumbled the boys.
‘Speak up!’
‘Yes, sir,’ they replied, again.
Mr. Howard swung off swiftly down the street. William Arnold waited until he was out of sight before he said, ‘I hope a bird drops something right smack on his nose — ‘
‘Come on, Clara, let’s play poison,’ said Isabel, hopefully.
Clara pouted. ‘It’s been spoiled. I’m going home.’
‘I’m poisoned!’ cried Donald Bowers, falling to the earth and frothing merrily. ‘Look, I’m poisoned! Gahhh!’
‘Oh,’ cried Clara, angrily, and ran away.
Saturday morning Mr. Howard glanced out of his front window and swore when he saw Isabel Skelton making chalk marks on his pavement and then hopping about, making a monotonous sing-song with her voice.
‘Stop that!’
Rushing out, he almost flung her to the pavement in his emotion. He grabbed her and shook her violently and let her go and stood over her and the chalk marks.
‘I was only playing hopscotch,’ she sobbed, hands over her eyes.
‘I don’t care, you can’t play it here,’ he declared. Bending, he erased the chalk marks with his handkerchief, muttering. ‘Young witch. Pentagrams. Rhymes and incantations, and all looking perfectly innocent, God, how innocent. You little fiend!’ he made as if to strike her, but stopped. Isabel ran off, wailing. ‘Go ahead, you little fool!’ he screamed, furiously. ‘Run off and tell your little cohorts that you’ve failed. They’ll have to try some other way! They won’t get around me, they won’t, oh, no!’
He stalked back into his house and poured himself a stiff drink of brandy and drank it down. The rest of the day he heard the children playing kick-the-can, hide-and-seek. Over-Annie-Over, jacks, tops, mibs, and the sound of the little monsters in every shrub and shadow would not let him rest. ‘Another week of this,’ he thought, ‘and I’ll be stark staring.’ He flung his hand to his aching head. ‘God in heaven, why weren’t we all born adults?’
Another week, then. And the hatred growing between him and the children. The hate and the fear growing apace. The nervousness, the sudden tantrums over nothing, and then — the silent waiting, the way the children climbed the trees and looked at him as they swiped late apples, the melancholy smell of autumn settling in around the town, the days growing short, the night coming too soon.
‘But they won’t touch me, they won’t dare touch me,’ thought Mr. Howard sucking down one glass of brandy after another. ‘It’s all very silly anyhow, and there’s nothing to it. I’ll soon be away from here, and — them. I’ll soon — ‘
There was a white skull at the window.
It was eight o’clock of a Thursday evening. It had been a long week, with the angry flares and the accusations. He had had to continually chase the children away from the water-main excavation in front of his house. Children loved excavations, hiding-places, pipes and conduits and trenches, and they were ever ascramble over and on and down in and up out of the holes where the new pipes were being laid. It was all finished, thank the Lord, and tomorrow the workmen would shovel in the earth and tamp it down and put in a new cement pavement, and that would eliminate the children. But, right now —
There was a white skull at the window!
There could be no doubt that a boy’s hand held the skull against the glass, tapping and moving it. There was a childish tittering from outside.
Mr. Howard burst from the house. ‘Hey, you!’ He exploded into the midst of the three running boys. He leaped after them, shouting and yelling. The street was dark, but he saw the figures dart beyond and below him. He saw them sort of bound and could not remember the reason for this, until too late.
The earth opened under him. He fell and lay in a pit, his head taking a terrific blow from a laid water-pipe, and as he lost consciousness he had an impression as of an avalanche, set off by his fall, cascading down cool moist pellets of dirt upon his pants, his shoes, upon his coat, upon his spine, upon the back of his neck, his head, filling his mouth, his ears, his eyes, his nostrils. . .
The neighbour lady with the eggs wrapped in a napkin, knocked on Mr. Howard’s door the next day for five minutes. When she opened the door, finally, and walked in, she found nothing but specules of rug-dust floating in the sunny air, the big halls were empty, the cellar smelled of coal and clinkers, and the attic had nothing in it but a rat, a spider, and a faded letter. ‘Funniest thing,’ she said many times in the following years, ‘whatever happened to Mr. Howard.’
And adults, being what they are, never observant, paid no attention to the children playing ‘Poison’ on Oak Bay Street, in all the following autumns. Even when the children leaped over one particular square of cement, twisted about and glanced at the marks on it which read:
‘M. HOWARD — R.I.P.’
‘Who’s Mr. Howard, Billy?’
‘Aw, I guess he’s the guy who laid the cement.’
‘What does R.I.P. mean?’
‘Aw, who knows? You’re poison! you stepped on it!’
‘Get along, get along, children; don’t stand in Mother’s path! Get along now!’
Uncle Einar
‘IT will take only a minute,’ said Uncle Einar’s sweet wife.
‘I refuse,’ he said. ‘And that takes me but a second.’
‘I’ve worked all morning,’ she said, holding to her slender back. ‘And you refuse to help? It’s drumming for a rain.’
‘Let it rain,’ he cried, morosely. ‘I’ll not be pierced by lightning just to air your clothes.’
‘But you’re so quick at it,’ she buttered him. ‘Take you no time.’
‘Again, I refuse.’ His vast tarpaulin wings hummed nervously behind his indignant back.
She gave him a slender rope on which were tied one hundred fresh-washed clothes. He turned it in his fingers with a distaste on his mouth and in his eyes. ‘So it’s come to this,’ he muttered, bitterly. ‘To this, to this, to this.’ He almost wept angry and acid tears.
‘Don’t cry; you’ll wet them down again,’ she said. ‘Jump up, now, run them about and it’ll be finished in a jiffy.’
‘Run them about,’ he said in mockery, both hollow and deep and terribly wounded. ‘I say: let it thunder, let it pour!’
‘If it was a nice sunny day I wouldn’t ask,’ she said, reasonably. ‘All my washing gone for nothing if you don’t. They’ll hang about the house — ‘
That did it. If it was anything he hated it was clothes flagged and festooned so a man had to creep under them on the way across a room. He jumped up. He boomed his vast green wings.
‘But only as far as the pasture fence,’ he said.
‘That’s a darling!’ She laughed with relief.
Whirl: and up he jumped, like a spring, and his wings chewed and loved the cool air. Before you’d say Uncle Einar Has Green Wings he roared low across the farmland from his house, trailing the line of clothes in a vast fluttering loop behind, drying them in the pounding concussion and backwash from his wings!
‘Catch!’
A minute later, back from the trip, he sailed the clothes, dry as popcorn, down on a series of clean blankets she’d laid for their landing spot.
‘Thank you, my sweet!’ she cried.
‘Gahh!’ he shouted, and flew off to settle under the apple tree and brood.
Uncle Einar’s beautiful silk-like wings hung like sea-green sails behind him and whirred and whispered from his shoulders when he sneezed or turned around swiftly. He was one of the few ones in the Family whose talent was visible.
All the other cousins and nephews and brothers of his in various lands, in little towns across the world, did unseen mental things or did things with their fingers or their teeth, or blew across the sky like leaves, or loped in forests like wolves. They lived in comparative safety from the normal humans. Not so a man with great green wings.
Not that he hated his wings. Far from it. In his youth he’d always flown nights. Nights were the times for winged men. Daylight held dangers, always had, always would, but night, ah, night, he had sailed over far lands and farther seas. With no danger to himself. It had been a rich full flying and an exhilaration.
But now he could not fly at night.
On his way home to some high mountain pass in Europe
