HAROLD BRODKEY
55
She was, however, now defending herself, the family, against the
false accusation of my struck eye, of my scream: she was in a sense–
and briefly-morally hysterical: to punish me, to fend me off, she
struck me a third time.
With the stick.
When I'd screamed, I'd lifted my head-I mean I bent it upward.
She may have meant to strike the eye again but she got the nostril–
there was a shoving disarrangement of the center of my face and a
squishing-squashing woodeny noise.
Part of her
expen'mentwas
a dabbling, so to speak, in delivering a
blow in the masculine style-but she hadn't taken on masculine attri–
butes: she had hit me as a girl-it was a little like being underwater
and watching someone stick a stick into the water and poke at you:
there is a mask, a shield of refraction: the refraction in this case led to
her being a floor, a masked girl dabbling.
But her identity , for me, was packed full of history: another girl,
that is,
if
Nonie had been a different sort ofgirl, a witty one, a laugher:
and had done this, the meaning of the blows would have been differ–
ent: her innocence would have been proportional to her, oh, worth-to–
me: it would have been almost a percentage, a twenty-five percent
guilt, a lesser hortor.
But Nonie was not valuable to me as a person unless she made an
effort to be nice to me-or
if
not an effort, so long as she was drawn to
me, or needed me.
Now she had dabbled-I would have felt another girl had not
meant to hit me: but in this case, it was
Nonie hit me.
My sense of her
guilt was total, was absolute.
Absolute? Only in a sense. The initial emotion was partly like a
blow by a pipe swathed in cloth-of it-was-impossible-she-should-hit–
me, this-had-not-happened.
The sudden accession of shock, the physical shock, the anesthesia,
perhaps brought on the mental shock, the sense of impossibility, and
its moral tone: the impossible is either magic or a dream.
We need logic so desperately that the unlikely is always in effect
seriously criminal. The more unlikely something is, the more it swells
into a grandeur of wickedness as the Calvinists thought .
The thick petals of galling sensation and of numbness, of half-
