PALM SUNDAY
59
facing the music rack. He began playing the music with one hand,
and put his left
~urn
around my stomach and held me close to him,
his fingers just inside my belt. I remember I couldn't sing for a
moment, and all at once he stopped playing, turned me around
toward him, and started to undo the buckle.
"So along about the middle of the afternoon, Snitch steps off
the bus right in front of the house with a package under his arm no
bigger than the Sunday paper, and without so much as a by-your–
leave or a 'Nuts-to-you-Father,' disappears into the cellar. Was my
face pink.-After a decent interval, during which I took time to
compose myself, I came over here to the cellar and found Snitch
with his sailcloth all spread out on the floor like a circus tent at
midnight, and there was, so help me, thirty-six yards of it."
That was two days before Palm Sunday. I suppose I should
say
that after it was over I suffered all the tortures of the damned,
but I don't think you do at fourteen and I didn't, at least not then.
I was too scared and excited to do anything about it and
a~yway
it
was all over in a minute. My chief reaction was confusion and a
consequent resentment, but not against Mr. Verne. It was directed
chiefly against myself, was very intense for a little while, and then
was easily forgotten. I left the church a few moments later, very
anxious to be alone, and at once dismissed it from my mind. When
I thought about it later, that night alone in my bed, my resentment
and confusion were gone, and my imagination was held by excit–
ing
hut vague pictures of the future, in which, curiously enough,
Ray
Verne did not figure.
The next day, Saturday, Mr. Verne was to hear me sing for
one last rehearsal, but this time
it
was to be in the Methodist
<lurch where he was working that day. I arrived shortly after
noon and let myself in at one of the big front doors. I had never
been in that church before and it seemed to me, as I walked slowly
down it, the vastest space I had ever seen indoors. Mr. Verne was
up at the organ, improvising, I believe you call it; and when he
18W
me, he stopped at once, turned on the bench, and said, "How'd
you like to go up into the steeple?"
I said I would, and I would. The Methodist steeple had always
been
a thing of awe to me, and still was, at fourteen. I had a paper
route before school mornings that took me by the Methodist church
~ery
day, and almost every morning I'd have to stand there a
