«I think we’ve had quite enough. . . unless Joel would care to hear another.»
Joel bided time, tasting his power; then, recalling the miserable lonesome afternoon, spitefully
gave a negative nod.
Amy pursed her lips. «. . .the last chance you’ll ever have to humiliate me,» she told Randolph,
flouncing over to the curio cabinet, and replacing her blue fan. Joel had inspected the contents of this
cabinet before supper, and had yearned to have as his own such treasures as a jolly Buddha with a fat
jade belly, a two-headed china crocodile, the program of a Richmond ball dated 1862 and autographed
by Robert E. Lee, a tiny wax Indian in full war regalia, and several plush-framed daintily painted
miniatures of virile dandies with villainous mustaches. «It’s your house, I’m perfectly aware. . .»
But a queer sound interrupted: a noise like the solitary thump of an oversized raindrop, it
drum-drummed down the stairsteps. Randolph stirred uneasily. «Amy,» he said, and coughed
significantly. She did not move.
«Is it the lady?» asked Joel, but neither answered, and he was sorry he’d drunk the sherry: the
parlor, when he did not concentrate hard, had a bent tilted look, like the topsy-turvy room in the
crazyhouse at Pontchartrain. The thumping stopped, an instant of quiet, then an ordinary red tennis ball
rolled silently through the archway.
With a curtsy, Amy picked it up, and, balancing it in her gloved hand, brought it under close
scrutiny, as if it were a fruit she was examining for worms. She exchanged a troubled glance with
Randolph.
«Shall I come with you?» he said, as she hurried out.
«Later, when you’ve sent the boy to bed.» Her footsteps resounded on the black stairs;
somewhere overhead a doorlatch clicked.
Randolph turned to Joel with a desperately cheerful expression. «Do you play parcheesi?»
Joel was still puzzling over the tennis ball. He concluded, finally, that it would be best just to
pretend as though it were the most commonplace thing in the world to have a tennis ball come rolling into
your room out of nowhere. He wanted to laugh. Only it wasn’t funny. He couldn’t believe in the way
things were turning out: the difference between this happening, and what he’d expected was too great. It
was like paying your fare to see a wild-west show, and walking in on a silly romance picture instead. If
that happened, he would feel cheated. And he felt cheated now.
«Or shall I read your fortune?»
Joel held up a clenched hand; the grimy fingers unfurled like the leaves of an opening flower, and
the pink of his palm was dotted with sweat-beads. Once, thinking how ideal a career it would make, he’d
ordered from a concern in New York City a volume calledTechniques of Fortune-Telling, authored by
an alleged gypsy whose greasy earringed photo adorned the jacket; lack of funds, however, cut short this
project, for, in order to become a bonafide fortune-teller, he had to buy, it developed, a generous
amount of costly equipment.
«Sooo,» mused Randolph, drawing the hand out of shadow nearer lamplight. «Is it important that I
see potential voyages, adventure, an alliance with the pretty daughter of some Rockefeller? The future is
to me strangely unexciting: long ago I came to realize my life was meant for other times.»
«But it’s the future I want to know,» said Joel.
Randolph shook his head, and his sleepy sky-blue eyes, contemplating Joel, were sober, serious.
«Have you never heard what the wise men say: all of the future exists in the past.»
«At least may I ask a question?» and Joel did not wait for any judgment: «There are just two
things I’d like to know, one is: when am I going to see my dad?» And the quietness of the dim parlor
seemed to echo when? when?
Gently releasing the hand, Randolph, a set smile stiffening his face, rose and strolled to a window,
his loose kimono swaying about him; he folded his arms like a Chinaman into the butterfly sleeves, and
stood very still. «When you are quite settled,» he said. «And the other?»
Eyes closed: a dizzy well of stars. Open: a bent tilted room where twin kimonoed figures with
curly yellow hair glided back and forth across the lopsided floor. «I saw that Lady, and she was real,
wasn’t she?» but this was not the question he’d intended.
Randolph opened the window. The rain had stopped, and cicadas were screaming in the wet
summer dark. «A matter of viewpoint, I suppose,» he said, and yawned. «I know her fairly well, and to
me she is a ghost.» The night wind blew in from the garden, flourishing the drapes like faded gold flags.
5
Wednesday, after breakfast, Joel shut himself in his room, and went about the hard task of
thinking up letters. It was a hot dull morning, and the Landing, though now and again Randolph’s sick
cough rattled behind closed doors, seemed, as usual, too quiet, too still. A fat horsefly dived toward the
Red Chief tablet where Joel’s scrawl wobbled loosely over the paper; at school this haphazard style had
earned him an F in penmanship. He twitched, twirled his pencil, paused twice to make water in the china
slopjar so artistically festooned with pink-bottomed cupids clutching watercolor bouquets of ivy and
violet; eventually, then, the first letter, addressed to his good friend Sammy Silverstein, read, when
finished, as follows:
«You would like the house I am living in Sammy as it is a swell house and you would like my dad
as he knows all about airplanes like you do. He doesn’t look much like your dad though. He doesn’t
wear specs or smoke cigars, but is tall like Mr Mystery (if Mr Mystery comes to the Nemo this summer
write and tell all about it) and smokes a pipe and is very young. He gave me a .22 and when winter
comes we will hunt possum and eat possum stew. I wish you could come and visit me as we would have
a real good time. One thing we could do is get drunk with my cousin Randolph. We drink alcohol
bevrages (sp?) and he is a lot of fun. Its sure not like New Orleans, Sammy. Out here a person old as us
is a grown up person. You owe me 20¢. I will forget this det if you will write all news every week. Hello
to the gang, remember to write your friend. . .»
and with masterly care he signed his name in a new manner: J.H.K. Sansom. Several times he read it
aloud; it had a distinguished, adult sound, a name he could readily imagine prefixed by such proud titles
as General, Judge, Governor, Doctor. Doctor J.H.K. Sansom, the celebrated operating specialist;
Governor J.H.K. Sansom, the peoples’ choice («Hello, warden, this is the Governor, just called to say
I’ve given Zoo Fever a reprieve»). And then of course the world and all its folks would love him, and
Sammy, well, Sammy could sell this old letter for thousands of dollars.
But searching for i’s not dotted, t’s uncrossed, it came to him that almost all he’d written were lies,
big lies poured over the paper like a thick syrup. There was no accounting for them. These things he’d
said, they should be true, and they weren’t. At home, Ellen was forever airing unwelcome advice, but
now he wished he could close his eyes, open them, and see her standing there. She would know what to
do.
His pencil traveled so fast occasional words linked: how sorry he was not to have written sooner;
he hoped Ellen was o.k., and ditto the kids. . . he missed them all, did they miss him? «It is nicehere,» he
wrote, but a pain twinged him, so he got up to walk the floor and knock his hands together nervously.
How was he going to tell her? He stopped by the window and looked down at the garden where, except
for Jesus Fever’s tomcat, parading before the ruined columns, all seemed stagnant, painted: the lazy
willows, shadowless in the morning sunshine; the hammered slave-bell muffled in the high weeds. Joel
shook his head, as if to rock his thoughts into sensible order, then returned to the table, and angrily
penciling out «It is nicehere,» wrote: «Ellen, I hate this place. I don’t know where he is and nobody will tell
me. Willyou believe it Ellen when I say I have notseen him? Honest; Amy says he’s sick but I don’t
believe oneword as I don’t likeher. She lookslike that mean Miss Addie down the street that use to be
making suchalot of unecesary stink. Another thing is, there are no radios, picture shows, funny papers
and if you want to take a bath you got to fill a washtub with water from the well. I can’t see how
Randolph keeps clean as he does. I like him o.k. but I don’t like it here onebit. Ellen did mama leave
enough $ so I could go away to a school where you can live? Like a military school. Ellen I miss you.
Ellen please tell me what to do. Love from Joel XXXXXXXX.»
He felt better now, easier in his mind; say what you will, Ellen had never let him down. He felt so
good that, stuffing the letters in their envelopes, he began to whistle, and it was the tune the twins had
taught him:when the north wind doth blow, and we shall have snow . . . What was her name? And
that other one, the tomboy? Florabel and Idabel. There was no reason why he had to mope around here
all day: hadn’t they invited him to visit? Florabel and Idabel and Joel, he thought, whistling happy,
whistling loud.
«Quiet in there,» came Randolph’s muffled complaint. «I’m desperately, desperately ill. . .» and
broke off into coughing.
Ha ha! Randolph could go jump in the lake. Ha ha! Joel laughed inwardly as he went to the old
bureau where the lacquered chest, containing now his bullet, the bluejay feather, and coins amounting
