PALM SUNDAY
61
eight feet square and Mr. Verne said this was it, this was as far as
we could go.
I stood up and sure enough the sloping circular walls met all
together just a few feet over our heads. There were some old ropes
lying in a corner and a pile of old papers, and near the floor were
four small round windows, looking out to four different directions.
I knew those windows well, though I had always thought they were
openings to a dove·cote, and here they were as big as our bathroom
window at home. I leaned down and looked out, and stay€d there
a long time looking. This was when I pretended the most, because
I was too scared to think of myself or of where I was and why.
Sticking up over the trees, looking much nearer than it was to walk
it, I could see the school-house and the school-house clock. And all
around, sprinkled with more trees than you would have believed,
spread the town-but not far, not far at all; for only a block ot
two away, it seemed, the houses stopped and country began: farms
and hills and long fields. I got my nose right to the glass and
looked down at the post-office across the street from the church, and
a car drove up in front and a man got out and ran up the steps, and
it was Mr. Brock. I could tell it was, because of the yellow cordu–
roy jacket that he always wore on week-days, and I was surprised
that I could see it was Mr. Brock from here. I don't know what Mr.
Verne was doing all this time and I don't think he said anything,
till
finally he said, "Come here a minute. Stand over here." Then
what I was scared would happen happened; but right in the middle
of
everything, when my fear had turned into something else just
u
frightening, Mr. Verne stopped what he was doing and I heard
him
say: "Gosh you're good." He gave a low laugh and looked up
at
me and said: "You're almost as good as your brother."
Only a couple of times in my life have I been sick and that
wu
one of them, but it was not a sickness of the body or anything
organic, it was the sickness of rage and shock and a dozen other
things which to this day I have never been able to account for or
aplain, because I have not experienced such a feeling since. On
my way down the steps out of the steeple I knew, or thought I knew,
it
was the last time I would ever be inside the Methodist Episcopal
Olurch. But it wasn't. I had to go there again, once, years later,
ud
again it was to see Mr. Verne, whom I was old enough by that
time to call "Ray," but wouldn't.
