A BRIDGE OF BREATH
571
on the pallet in the summer of the afternoons, there was the drone of
the electric fanlike the drone of bees and mama going through the
rooms in her slip. I felt frail and limp.
It
was just sorrow bred in me,
bred
in
you too, you'll see; we are the sons of grief at cricket. I had
to stop it.
"I was wild for the world of a flashing eye and life castanetting
round and stomping an insinuating foot. Sometimes in Charity I
couldn't stand it any longer and would go out in the henhouse and
make up dreams and play like I was something grand and royal and
march up and down with a poker for a cane, with only the chickens
to watch me. And then love myself and feel
real
again, a kind of
tremor from the world ran through me.
"Behold my talents: started out in the Church with good Hattie
Clegg, led Young People's programs, gave the main speech, sang a
solo, then a duet with some girl, then said the final Benediction-it
was
all
my show. Went to Conferences at Lon Morris College, even
signed up to be a missionary. I was just looking for some passionate
cause in the world to give myself to (so are
all
of you, all of you)–
can I help it if the Church petered out for me? Then I turned to
music and the stage. At the high school I was in every play that was
put on and I even wrote an original musical show for the Senior
Night; and at Grace Methodist Church I was always directing plays,
sang in the choir, sang solos, did impersonations on programs in
Fellowship Hall, played the piano by ear, anything that was make–
believe. To make me forget that cistern wheel turning and turning
and that old shuttered house and the family Sundays on the front
porch.
"0 the drone of the flies and the bees droning in the zinnias
like a sound blown by a child on a comb and a piece of tissue-paper;
and the melancholy working of the wind in the trees and a whole
dead town gleaming out before us in a false serenity under the burn–
ing sun of a fleecy gathered summer Sunday sky with a piece of a
moon in it, and nothing happening.
"When the circus came to Bailey's Pasture I knew this was my
chance. Remember how you and I and Aunt Malley went and what
we saw and did, the yellow-skinned grinning freaks in their stalls
with the sawdust floor, twisted like worms the freaks grinned and
ground in the sawdust; and the screams of the animals in the menag-
