JOHN THOMPSON
223
behind him in broad daylight. But it is with a violence known to no shy
mouse that again a sulfurous discharge strikes in his heart and for him
Sigsbee School is no more than some old witch's gingerbread house. A
boy could kick it down. It was all in the blink of any eye, a flare, out, over
with. Then the sky is still blue, the flag still aloft. So there the school
stands, he is alone, no snow-white bird to guide him with its song, this
outcast. (One may wonder what pangs and surmises were smothered by
Nurse Hoeksma and Teacher when they asked each other the where–
abouts of Dick.)
Still, is he not far better off than some lone jack tar set adrift who will
say why, to bob in his dinghy as his ship's mastheads fade beyond the rim
of the Ocean Sea? It is no more than half a mile all told to Dick's own
by-street.
At this very moment, to the West six miles or so as the crow flies, all
the way across town over the railway tracks and near the river, beyond the
factories of Godfrey Avenue, we can spot alongside the spur line in the
dusky yard of S.A. Morman
&
Co., Coal and Ice, an enormous hopper.
With its rickety-looking conveyor it looms above the village of corrugat–
ed iron sheds and the great mounds of coal. Some few of these newly
wet-down shine like black diamond pyramids. Viewed from our imaginary
angel's roost, the hopper's huge square maw most wickedly and vertigi–
nously, had we any such weakness, invites the acrophobic to plunge.
All but concealed in the bay beneath this giant funnel is a truck. The
gritty air, as we focus our gaze through it, is deaf with a wide stunned yawn
and void to the far horizon where vanishes shimmering the last echo of
concussion; the steel truck bed has just taken its fall, three tons of coal.
A black man in bib overalls and the sort of mattress ticking loaf-shaped
cap railroaders use stands quartered beside the hopper, circling his left hand.
"Huh mahn baa," he calls, "Mahn baa." Mighty tailgate first the vehi–
cle emerges.
As the driver clambers from cab to toolbox lid and hops down to the
yard, foreshortened as he is in our perspective we observe that he is a hefty
fellow of energetic movement. He disappears beneath the shed roof. The
black man is sluicing assiduously from a hose on the truck. It is enameled
in that deep emerald called today "British Racing" and smartly crimson–
striped. Bold block serif letters in white, outlined again in crimson
striping, state its sponsor and mission. Scrubbed with a long-handle brush
the juggernaut bright-banded wood-spoke artillery wheels and even their
brutal block-cleated tires glisten. The sharply-raked French style bonnet
with its slanted vent lines receives some chamois polishing, and reaching
high up the helper dabs at the radiator cap ornament of the five-ton Model
