PARTISAN REVIEW
Montague was about four-years-old. He had on a short faded
pink shirt with buttons along its hem for the missing and matching
britches. From
his
belly button down he w.as naked, slim and long.
He stood and scowled in the sunlight, one
.arm
flung over his fore–
head to shadow
his
eyes. He absorbed what he saw with primitive
greed, .and the tongue in his mouth would have waggled strange rote
if
they had encouraged him. Hadn't he heard Willie call the paler
man curious names? And Montague w.as not moved into the world
enough to know of sin and sinners, secrets and dark delusions.
Suddenly one of the paler children in the Model T espied
him,
the innocent nude, and furiously denounced him. His ears heard alarm
without recognizing it. Everyone seemed to fling shots like fumes
at him. The white woman drew the little girl's head down into her
lap. The little girl sobbed aloud.
Then the sky resolved itself into a hard crystal, and the very
surface of the earth seemed hostile. His stranger father came loping
across the yard at him, clumsy in pistol-legged overalls. His immense
knees and thighs were meaty, cat flexible, and his great feet were
bare pads against the moist grainy soil. He shoved Montague inside,
roughly.
Outside the Model T stood, full of the radiant creatures which
had suddenly appeared in this infested .air. That sweet gaunt little
chariot. Here there were no windows, in this shack. It was like the
county jail. No mobility, mildewed darkness, acrid with mustiness,
lair of rats and the phantom dead. Montague wept bitterly beside
the water bucket,
his
eyes little running spigots, and, like humans,
he grieved. He wanted to be where everybody was, doing the things
everybody did. This was the first law and they broke it.
Every time Willie had to talk to him the white man made a poor
mouth. The poor mouth being always contagious, crabbed Willie
came inside talking bitter disgust, like dusty speech, to Delia, who
listened with a quiet leaf strained face. Then, in the evening, Willie
laughed a wild laugh and told crazy stories, like the one about the ,..
wake he had attended, when the dead had been alive in .a coma. The
preacher stood with
his
back to the ironing-board on which she lay
beneath the sheet, and as he preached she woke, the earthern dead
woman, moving in mute weariness. She raised a hand and clawed
away the sheet. Everybody in the room sat breathless and paralytic.
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