Short Stories

STORIES FOR GRANDKIDS #1

/ Ken Finton / 1 Comment

 

446px-Doris_Ulmann_-_Southern_mountaineer

 

Grandpa chewed on the butt end of his cigar as I read him my poem. His eyes rolled a bit beneath the thick wire rimmed glasses and the smoke from the cigar chaffed my nose.

“It’s a good one, son,” he told me, “but it ain’t much to my liking.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Poems were good in my day,” he replied. “You heared a lot of poems back then, The folks who wrote them did not indulge in themselves the way they do now. They didn’t cry over their spilt feelings so much. Your little story is about what you lost out on. Everybody loses out on something or someone. You can’t get through your term on earth less’n you do.”

He placed his cigar on the ashtray that stood on a pedestal near his chair. It raised waves of smoke, then went out.

“They told stories back then,” he continued. “Sometimes they dressed their words up in fancy duds … least wise, they did if they went on for further schoolin’. They learn you to use big words at universities.”

“So you didn’t think it was good?” I asked. I felt disappointed. I thought it was good enough to show him. Becky had just told me she wanted to go steady with Fred. I wrote about it, telling how Fred was a homely bastard who has too many pimples. I could not understand what she saw in him and I wrote about it my poem.

“Love poems are fair to middling,” he said. “Everybody falls in love. It drives you crazy for a while … wanting this and wanting that. Get to your age and it’s passion and infatuation. It feels strong, but it ain’t a lasting thing. A good story is a lasting thing.”

“What makes a good story?” I asked.

“It ain’t so much what you say, but the way you say it,” he replied. “If you say it good, then people will understand it.”

He took a book from the table beside the ashtray.  “Now here’s one I always liked,” he said. He began to read.

 

 

images

The Ballad of William Sycamore’ was originally published by Stephen Vincent Benét in 1922.

THE BALLAD OF WILLIAM SYCAMORE 

by: Stephen Vincent Benét 

My father he was a mountaineer,

His fist was a knotty hammer;

He was quick on his feet as a running deer,

And he spoke with a Yankee stammer.

My mother, she was merry and brave,

And so she came to her labor,

With a tall green fir for her doctor grave

And a stream for her comforting neighbor.

And some are wrapped in the linen fine,

And some like a godling’s scion;

But I was cradled on twigs of pine

In the skin of a mountain lion.

And some remember a white, starched lap

And a ewer with silver handles;

But I remember a coonskin cap

And the smell of bayberry candles.

The cabin logs, with the bark still rough,

And my mother who laughed at trifles,

And the tall, lank visitors, brown as snuff,

With their long, straight squirrel-rifles.

I can hear them dance, like a foggy song,

Through the deepest one of my slumbers,

The fiddle squeaking the boots along

And my father calling the numbers.

The quick feet shaking the puncheon-floor,

And the fiddle squealing and squealing,

Till the dried herbs rattled above the door

And the dust went up to the ceiling.

There are children lucky from dawn till dusk,

But never a child so lucky!

For I cut my teeth on “Money Musk”

In the Bloody Ground of Kentucky!

When I grew as tall as the Indian corn,

My father had little to lend me,

But he gave me his great, old powder-horn

And his woodsman’s skill to befriend me.

With a leather shirt to cover my back,

And a redskin nose to unravel

Each forest sign, I carried my pack

As far as a scout could travel.

Till I lost my boyhood and found my wife,

A girl like a Salem clipper!

A woman straight as a hunting-knife

With eyes as bright as the Dipper!

We cleared our camp where the buffalo feed,

Unheard-of streams were our flagons;

And I sowed my sons like the apple-seed

On the trail of the Western wagons.

They were right, tight boys, never sulky or slow,

A fruitful, a goodly muster.

The eldest died at the Alamo.

The youngest fell with Custer.

The letter that told it burned my hand.

Yet we smiled and said, “So be it!”

But I could not live when they fenced the land,

For it broke my heart to see it.

I saddled a red, unbroken colt

And rode him into the day there;

And he threw me down like a thunderbolt

And rolled on me as I lay there.

The hunter’s whistle hummed in my ear

As the city-men tried to move me,

And I died in my boots like a pioneer

With the whole wide sky above me.

Now I lie in the heart of the fat, black soil,

Like the seed of the prairie-thistle;

It has washed my bones with honey and oil

And picked them clean as a whistle.

And my youth returns, like the rains of Spring,

And my sons, like the wild-geese flying;

And I lie and hear the meadow-lark sing

And have much content in my dying.

Go play with the towns you have built of blocks,

The towns where you would have bound me!

I sleep in my earth like a tired fox,

And my buffalo have found me.

 

Stephen Vincent Benét

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Stephen Vincent Benét (July 22, 1898 – March 13, 1943) was an American author, poet, short story writer and novelist. He is best known for his book-length narrative poem of the American Civil War, John Brown’s Body (1928), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1929, and for two short stories, “The Devil and Daniel Webster” and “By the Waters of Babylon”.

Benet’s fantasy short story The Devil and Daniel Webster won an O. Henry Award, and he furnished the material for a one-act opera by Douglas Moore. The story was filmed in 1941 and shown originally under the title All That Money Can Buy.

Benét was born into an Army family in Fountain Hill, Pennsylvania, near Bethlehem in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. He spent most of his boyhood in Benicia, California. At the age of about ten, Benét was sent to the Hitchcock Military Academy. A graduate of The Albany Academy in Albany, New York and Yale University, where he was a member of Wolf’s Head Society and the power behind the Yale Lit, according to Thornton Wilder. He was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for “Western Star”, an unfinished narrative poem on the settling of America.

It was a line of Benet’s poetry that gave the title to Dee Brown’s famous history of the destruction of Native American tribes by the United States: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

He also adapted the Roman myth of the rape of the Sabine Women into the story The Sobbin’ Women, which in turn was adapted into the movie musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

John Brown’s Body was staged on Broadway in 1953, in a three-person dramatic reading featuring Tyrone Power, Judith Anderson and Raymond Massey, and directed by Charles Laughton.

Benet’s brother, William Rose Benét (1886–1950), was a poet, anthologist and critic who is largely remembered for his desk reference, The Reader’s Cyclopedia (1948).

THE MARE’S NEST

/ Ken Finton / 2 Comments

1. Mare’s nest: a complex and difficult situation; a muddle

2. an illusory discovery such as “the mares next of perfect safety”

songs1

©2017 Kenneth Harper Finton

THE MARE’S NEST

“When I’m good, I’m very good, but when I’m bad, I’m better.” -Mae West

   The child and the boy that Adam used to be was so foreign to him now. Looking over pages that he wrote years ago, Adam barely recognized his former self as the person who wrote them.

   Adam came from a conservative and opinionated small town in rural Ohio. Those who lived in his little town often claimed it was God’s country. Adam supposed that it might be good for the spirit to be content and proud of your community. God’s country seemed to be a stretch, though. So many wonderful spots in the world better fit that description.

   Life seemed to be so much more idyllic and simple then. Yet, it seems to Adam that this warmer view one has toward the past is never the case. Faded memories—the exclusive warm selections of chosen recollections—give the illusion that daily life was richer in the past than in the present. This is the mare’s nest. We are born in illusion and live most of our lives in a delusional fantasy with the blessings and approval of those who surround us.

II

   Religion and conservative politics were the mainstays of community belief when Adam was being raised. He was brought up to believe in things that were not real, but Adam had a problem with these beliefs. To suspend rational thought and dive into the unproven waters of belief was much easier when Adam was a child.

   Adam’s parents were good to him. They did everything they were supposed to do with a minimum of complaints and resentment. They were neither rich nor poor, neither too conservative nor too liberal.

   These were the days when a mother was expected to stay home and raise the children. The father was expected to bring in a paycheck and support the family. Yet, even then, the very ground of these expectations was trembling.World War II had shown women that they could manage without a man in charge. The experience of hundreds of thousands of years had proven to be false. The seeds of personal independence had taken root in even the most dependent of women. A new world was being born before Adam’s eyes. Only a very few seemed to realize that this was so.

III

Social taboos confuse men and women alike. A natural curiosity about the difference between men and women develops early in life. Adam remembered when he was four and took the train from Ohio to Colorado to visit his grandmother. He had little experience with the female sex. His curiosity got the best of him. His grandmother lived next to a family that had a daughter Adam’s age. She was deliciously blonde, wore a taffeta dress, and smelled of Ivory Soap. Adams’s play was often defined by guns and cowboys, trains, and fortifications. Society wanted him to grow up to be a good soldier. He was trained to defend his family and national interests while little Susie played with dolls and tea parties. It was the normal thing.

Adam had no idea who thought it up, but one warm afternoon they decided to explore one another’s bodies. Adam had no sister, so he was very curious to see what lay beneath that taffeta dress. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” he said.

She was every bit as curious as Adam. They went behind the shade of a weeping willow and she pulled up her dress. She wore white panties that were different from Adam’s jockey shorts. She eagerly pulled her panties down and Adam saw a vagina for the first time in his young life. How wonderful it looked to him—almost puffy and so very different from what he possessed. She took her hands and pulled the labial folds apart so that Adam could see the inside. He could see little curds of a cheese-like substance.

“I get that, too,” he said.

“Let me see,” she replied.

His penis quickly grew stiffer and larger. He pulled down his pants and showed her what he meant. Adam had never been circumcised, so he pulled back the foreskin and exposed the same little white curds that she had proudly displayed. “Do you want to touch it?” she asked.

“Maybe.”

“Well, you either do or you don’t,” she said.

“Yeah, I guess I do,” he said.

“Then go ahead. Touch me. I like it when I rub it right here. You can try if you want.”

Adam took his index finger and rubbed her there. It felt very good and he had a tight feeling come into his groin, the same feeling he had when he climbed a rope.

“See,” she said. “This is fun. Do you want to kiss it?”

“Not really,” he said. “Boys don’t kiss girls.”

“Yes, they do,” she said, “my Daddy does that to my Mom.”

“Well—what if I just touch it.”

“That’s okay, but I want to know what it feels like to be kissed down there.”

“How do you know your Dad does that?”

“I’ve seen them do it when they don’t know I can see them.”

“Oh,” I said. “My Dad doesn’t do that.”

“How do you know?” she said. “I bet he does. Then he takes his thing and he puts it into her and they wrestle around on the bed.”

“Why?” Adam asked.

“I don’t know,” she replied.

A voice from the house could be heard calling her name. “That’s my mother,” she said. “I gotta go.”

She pulled up her panties and ran off to the house. Adam had the feeling that he was in deep trouble. Something told him that he was not supposed to do that with her. Suddenly, he felt panicked.

He crawled up an apple tree as far as his limbs and legs could take him, Sure enough, within ten minutes his mother’s voice could be heard in the distance. “Get in here this moment,” she said. “Susie’s mother told me what you did.”

“What did I do?” he asked, knowing full well that he was in deeper territory that he had never before explored.

“You damned well know what you did,” mother said. “You were bad.”

Adam was totally embarrassed. His head hung low. If he were a dog, he surely would have put his tail between his legs.

* * *

Though childhood lasted more than a dozen years, Adam’s recollections of it seemed to reduce it to a few weeks. Almost all of it was learning and play and Adam loved both equally.

He had the best of many worlds. He lived on a couple of acres in the country, but his family was still close enough to ride his bike to town. Adam attended the city schools. He could ride his bike to visit friends and he could explore the creeks and wooded lands that surrounded his home. He felt so very much alive and so very happy to be.

Later, he would versify these feelings:

The Veils of Time

How often down these gravel roads my bike and I would roam.
Downhill like the lightning flash, up with winded moans …
Mapping streams and woods about me, finding spots where no one came.
Africa could be no stranger than the place in my dreamscape.

Ghosts of dead forgotten Indians, birch canoes and forest game,
hidden in the brambles forest, there beside the fields of grain.
Tadpoles swam among the minnows, dragonflies would dart and play.
Water bugs and prickly nettles, part of each midsummer’s day.

As it was in the beginning, so remain these things today,
in the places man’s forsaken, wilderness, ten feet away.
From a child’s imagination, pterodactyl seeks his prey.
Ages past still live forever when the veil of time is raised.

IV

Adam was always in love. Girls were so pretty and different from the boys with whom he camped and hiked. Their skin was more clear, their hair so long and shining, their dresses rustling and clean smelling. Their grace seemed like music in motion.

Every day was a new adventure. Every person Adam met filled him with curiosity. Everything he learned about the land and customs around him filled with satisfaction. He has never experienced the like since.

In kindergarten, he met Mary with her striking long brown pigtails. Mary owned a pony. Even though she lived in town, she kept the pony in a shed back by the alley. Since cowboys and horses are inseparable and Adam was a young cowboy, she attracted him much as moths seek out the flame. Mary came to visit Adam often. When she could not come to see him, he rode to town on his bike to see her.

Mary and Adam never made experiments and explorations such as he had with his grandmother’s neighbor some years before. Neither the need, the desire or the curiosity ever arose. She made certain of that. Once when Adam had hitched a ride with her on the back of her bike, he reached up to hold onto the seat and she told him, “Watch where you put your hands.”

Her words, though, had the opposite effect. It called attention to her khaki-clad shorts that loosely held her shapely buttocks. Adam wanted to put his hands around her and hang on for life. To this day, Adam is left to wonder if that is what she wanted as well.

There was a television show in the afternoon in the 1950s that featured people being married before the camera. The bride, dressed in white and lovely as a sunrise, came slowly walking down the aisle to her betrothed. Mary and Adam would secretly watch it and play out the parts in front of the TV. He would spend many a lonesome night snuggled with his pillow and dreaming that the long length of her lay warm beside him.

Of her, Adam was later to write:

My love, she wore a gingham dress.
She wore her hair in braids.
Far too young for sweet caress,
our love was heaven made.

We spent a thousand idle hours
together in our dreams,
We wandered near the ancient oaks
and napped beside the stream.

I thought we might be married there,
and then, when time be lost,
side by side, eternally,
we’d rest beneath a cross.

But childhood washes from us all,
and dreams seek other fancies.
Soon she walked with someone else,
this lovely, freckled lassie.

Sure enough, I moved away
to seek some higher labor,
and to this day I’ve not returned
nor seen my long-lost neighbors.

When finally this childish love
grew up and found some others,
I know when I lay down to rest,
they’re one with one another.

Follow me at kennethharperfinton.com

I LOST MY PENIS TODAY

/ Ken Finton / Leave a comment


k3906829

I lost my penis today. Somewhere in Penisylvania, I think.

I must have bent over and it fell out.

Frankly, I am lost without it.

I am a writer and I use it all the time.

It was a very special penis or I would simply go replace it.

I have tried using a peniscil instead, but I can’t keep it sharp like my fountain penis.

What to do? I could write on my laptop, I guess, but something is wrong with my spell check.
Every time I press a ‘p’, then an ‘e’, then an ‘n’ it adds an ‘is’.
This will not do. It is especially disconcerting when writing to my penis pal.
If I write much more, I might be sent to a penisal colony of a penisitentiary.
Further words from me will be penisding on solving this problem.
Thanks for reading.
Follow me at:

Go back

Your message has been sent

WORDS

/ Ken Finton / 1 Comment

 

© 2014 Kenneth Harper Finton

LYRICS — THE MUSIC IS ABOVE, THE LYRICS BELOW IT,  AND THE STORY BELOW THAT.
Continue reading →

APOSTLES OF GLORY

/ Ken Finton / 1 Comment

images

©2014 Kenneth Harper Finton

Warning: This is a story from 1961. It contains words and actions that can easily offend. It is a slice of time that was typical to most every small city in America. In the sixties, real estate brokers purposely brought blacks into all white neighborhoods to drive the prices down so they could get a bargain price for the homes, then sell to blacks that were hungry for homes of their own in a decent neighborhood, The practice was called “blockbusting”. Though it was illegal, the real estate agents made a common practice of telling the people in a neighborhood that members of a different race were moving into the neighborhood. It would depress and deflate the value of their property. The agents then sold the devalued homes to the minority group and gained a huge profit. 

Across the street in the cool of dusk it came, absorbed in the dirty air with the fumes from the refinery, the exhaust vapors and the laundry lint. A song in the twilight, a gentle ballad of people forgotten except in song – sung with the grace and feeling of a girl who has known life and the odious emotions of men.

Harry Johnson sat at the table sipping his coffee as the song slipped through the open window to his ears. He called to his wife with the voice of a bear, but entwined with the song it was the voice of a lamb. He didn’t notice the coffee stained table and the barren floor, the curtainless window and the peeling paint. He listened to the song, each painful note slapping his ears, the melancholy words playing on his upper lip.

His wife Marge was a big-hipped woman and the floorboards creaked as she entered the kitchen. “What now?” she asked.

Harry Johnson looked at his wife – her hair, once wind-swept lovely – was done up in a twisted knot, her face, once painted up with care, ashy and melted. 

“That song.” he said. “Where does that song come from?” he asked, pointing to the window. 

“How should I know? Am I supposed to he a mind reader or something?”

“It sounds like it comes from across the street,” Harry said.

“Might be. I heard we were getting new neighbors. It’s about time, too. It hasn’t been rented since the Talberts moved out.”

“Listen to the song,” he said. She listened with a wrinkle in her brow as the song blew in the window window with the sounds of passing cars, listened until it stopped and the sounds of the street were the only sounds.

“She’s got a good voice,” Harry said.

“She must be young,” his wife said. “No more than fifteen, l’d say.”

“It sure carries,” Harry said. “All the way over here from across to street and it sounded like she might have been sitting here at our own table.” 

“You could have bought that house, you know,” Marge said. “How would you like to be raised up in this place like Carolyn? How would you like it if you didn’t have a yard or trees or a house where you could stretch out and live? You could have given us something decent to live in for once. You could have bought that house, Harry.”

Harry’s face reflected thoughts and longings that ran deeper than his mind. “I know,” he said in a husky voice.

The cool of the evening was streaming in the window. “It’s probably the night that makes her voice carry,” Marge said, sensing Harry’s feelings. “Voices carry along towards night.”

“That must be it,” Harry said.

But now the song is gone and Harry notices the coffee-stained table and the drabness of the room. He was glad that it was Friday. 

“Tonight’s bowling night,” he said. “Where’s my ball?” 

“In the closet.”

Harry knew that the ball was in the closet. He always know where it was, yet every Friday evening be would ask, “Where’s my ball, for that was the way he asked if he could go bowling; and every Friday evening Marge would say, “In the closet,” for that was the way she would tell him he could go.

He went to the closet and picked up the brown canvas bag that felt heavy and worn in his big hands. He slipped on his jacket, for the night air would be cool. After he was gone he looked back at his apartment from the shadowed street, then looked over at the house across the street – the house he should have bought. It felt good to be away from the apartment. 

* * *

Harry Johnson saw his three friends waiting for him at the intersection. There was no use catching a bus for is was only seven blocks to the bowling lanes and it certainly was a fine night. 

He was glad to get away, glad to leave the apartment. He had always felt like a prisoner there with the dingy rooms and the burdensome voices and the evening when there was no peace. He would have bought the house across the street, but the neighborhood was becoming shabby and Harry was afraid he would lose if he invested.

“Hello, Harry.” 

“We’ve been waiting.” 

“Hello, Art, Dick. Joe.” 

They walked down the street toward the lanes. Art Richard was a tall man, half a cracker thin. He held his hands against his sharp and jutting chin. “Hear the news?” he asked. 

“What news?” 

“About the new neighbors.” 

“Across the street?” Harry asked. 

“Oh, you know then.” 

“Know what?” 

“They’re niggers.”

Harry looked hard at the tall man with the sharp chin and a mouth that spoke lies. “That’s nothin’   to joke about,” he said. 

Their strides quickened as though they wanted to leave a place where dirt and scum flowed into the gutter. “Moved in today,” Dick Marcus said. “A whole family of them.The nigger’s got a wife and two kids.” 

“It can’t be,” Harry said. 

“The whole neighborhood will go next.” Art Richards said, “I saw it happen over on 42nd Street. One nigger moved in and the rest started to come. It won’t be safe to step outside if we let them stay.”

“That’s a fact,” Dick Marcus said.

“We can’t let them get away with it. We gotta drive them out.”

“The way I look at it, we don’t have any choice,” Dick Marcus said. “We have our families to protect. Don’t you think so, Harry?”

Harry was thinking of a little Negro girl with a dark face, a song floating from clipped white teeth into the dark of night. “Sure,” he said. “Sure. It’s the only way.” 

None of the men bowled well that night. There were plans to make and wrongs to right. As the balls spun down the alleys and the pins clattered and the beer foamed in their throats, they talked.

After the match they stopped at the bar. Their voices stilled and they were silent. The bartender’s bald head glistened with as he asked them what was wrong. Still, they were silent.

Then they walked down the street. The night air was getting cooler. Art Richards pulled the zipper on his jacket clear up to his pointed chin, but the chill stayed in his spine. The city was enveloped with a hush that could only be surpassed by the silence that hung over a little town called Bethlehem, so far away and so many centuries ago. With the silence came a fear that that sliced the night.

Harry Johnson felt the fear, felt it crawling is his spine, felt it twisting is his stomach, felt its  macerations in his knees.

“Isn’t anyone going to do it?” he yelled. “Here, should I throw the first stone?” 

He picked up a stone from the deep, silt-filled gutter and hurled it with all his might. The crash of breaking glass slapped his ears. He dropped his arms and his mouth hung open wide. Suddenly, everyone was throwing rocks and stones end shouting curses, yet the house stayed dark and quiet. The air was heavy with an oppressive blackness. 

After it as all over, Harry Johnson stood at his kitchen window in his underwear looking out across the street at to house that he should have bought. He saw the yawning blackness and the broken panes, noticed that there was one window still unbroken, one window reflecting the twisting flames of the burning cross.

-2-

Tomorrow morning came as tomorrow mornings have a habit of doing. The untried light from the liquid sun found four men standing at a bus stop, waiting. Thee refinery was to run overtime today. The four men men were happy to make some extra money for themselves and their families.

Art Richards whispered – for he didn’t want the world to hear, “We sure got them last night, didn’t we?”

No one said a word.

“They had it comin’. Just wait ’til tonight if they’re still there.” 

“I don’t know if I want to do it again,”Joe Gantner said. 

“For Chrissake,” Harry said. “You don’t want your kids to grow up with a nigger for a neighbor, do you?”  

The words came out of Harry’s mouth, but he did not know why. 

“No, but still…” 

“Still hell,” Art Richards said. “We’ve got to get rid of them, that’s all.”

The bus came out of the morning and the four men went to work.

That evening after the factories closed and the men poured out like ants from their threatened castle. Harry Johnson sat over his supper of meat and potatoes, but he only picked at his food.

“Did you hear what happened to our new neighbors, Daddy?” Carolyn Johnson asked.

“Yes, I heard.”

“It serves them right,” Carolyn said. “Imagine the gall of them moving into an all white neighborhood. They have a daughter my age, too. How creepy!”

“That’s enough,” Harry snapped. “I don’t want to hear any more about it.”

He looked up at his wife’s face and saw the smirk on her lips. She knew.

After the last cup of coffee had been downed, after the dishes had been cleaned away to the sink and Harry Johnson was left alone with the falling sun, the song began. It was the same song, but ever so more haunting than before, scratching on the window, begging to penetrate the walls and bound into the heart.

He got up from the table and went to the window. Nothing seemed important except the song, for the song was life and life was important. But after the song ended, Harry felt the emptiness that he had felt before, for the song had lifted him to places he had never been before.

He went into the bedroom and took off his dirty work clothes and threw them on the bed on top of the sheets that looked like dirty handkerchiefs. He tried not to think.

“Going out?” his wife asked, as he walked toward the door. 

Harry shook his head.

“Do you want your bowling hall?” 

“No, I don’t want my bowling ball.

He opened the door, but behind him were words: “Harry?” He turned around. “Harry, be careful.” The look in her eye said ‘be careful’ and the sound of his heels on the steps rang out in his mind like a solemn chorus whispering the words ‘be careful’. 

Dick Marcus was already at the bar. They sat at a little table in a darkened corner and nobody saw them. In an hour there were six of them. They were Art’s friends. Harry didn’t care to know them.

He sat fingering his drink, but finally drank it. It felt good and warm in a hollow stomach. He had another and another, then another until he was dizzy and weak and nothing mattered anymore – not the blacks across the street, not the apartment, not his wife or daughter of the house across the street. 

Nothing.

It was nearly midnight when they walked back, the six of them. They thought they were an army. Six thousand strong they might have been and they could not have felt stronger of more fearless. They walked down the street on this Saturday night with Sunday morning a haze in a crystal ball. They walked under the stars that were blinking in the sky, under the moon that was an ocean moon like the ones that Harry had known and loved on a battleship is the South Pacific so may centuries ago.

Then they were is front of the house with the shattered glass. “Hey, you in there. Hey, niggers,” Art yelled, the liquor warm in his stomach. “Hey, you goddamned black-eyed son-of-a-bitch. We’re gonna get you. We’ll come back ’til you’re gone! You hear that niggers. Until you’re gone. Every goddamn night ’til you’re gone. We’re gonna get you, niggers.”

“Get their car,” yelled one of Art’s friends. “Get these black sons-a-bitches.”

The little army ran to the old, shabby car. One of Art’s friends drew a hammer and the glass was smashed. The tires were cut end the six were able to turn it on its side so that it lay dead with its tires spinning.

Somone had phoned the police and they heard the sirens cutting into their backs as the big black man and his daughter came running from the house.

“Get away,” the man yelled. “Get away from my car. Get away from my house.” 

“You black-eyed son-of-a-bitch,” yelled one of Art’s friends. “You black scum of the street, we’ll show you.” Four of them grabbed the big man and left him bleeding on the walk. 

“Get away from Poppa,” yelled the girl, pulling on Art. “Get away!” 

A fist to the face sent her reeling on the walk, her night dress was up to her waist. 

“Get her.” screamed the night. “Take her away,” but no one could tell who was doing the yelling. Harry saw two of them pick up to girl and run down the street under the street light and into to dark. “Run, you fools. Can’t you hear the cops?”

They ran into to alley and up to block. The sirens stopped, but the red lights flashed and shone orange upon to house across the street.

3

Harry awoke to to rattling of coffee in the percolator and to pungent odor of frying bacon. He could hear the floorboards creak as his wife walked over to to bed. “Harry?”

“Yeah, I’m awake.”

“Get up. You’ll be late for church.” 

“Huh?” 

“Get up. It’s Sunday morning.”

He opened his ayes and looked into the face of his wife, the ashen face with wrinkles he had never seen before. 

“I don’t want to go to church,” Harry said and closed his eyes. He could feel her staring at him and he opened them again.

“The girl, Harry. What about the girl?” There were tears in his wife’s eyes.

“What about her?” 

“What did they do to her?”

“Oh, hell, I don’t know. There were these two friends of Art’s. 1 don’t know.” 

“They raped her, didn’t they, Harry?” she said. Her voice was coarse and cracked. 

“I don’t know.” 

“I’ll bet they didn’t stop there, Harry.” 

“I don’t know.” He saw the tears stream down her cheeks and reached up to brush then away with the back of his hand. “Do you really think I ought to go?”

“Where?” 

“To church.”

“Sure,” she said. “Oh God, yes. Oh, Harry…”

Harry stood at the window and looked down upon the street before he put on his woolen suit and the snap-on bow tie. He saw the broken glass and the blood on the walk, the peeling paint and the broken shrubs.

He thought of a song, a song in the dusk and the voice of a maiden ringing out like a bell in the twilight – a voice that made him forget. He looked around the room that was more dismal than it. had ever been before and he knew that he would never forget again.

Not ever.