You felt how easing to your own hurt would be the sight of another man’s blood; you knew then that to vent your own pain you must see another man suffer too. Yes, a freezing marrow could be well warmed just by watching fresh blood flow—this, when you had not a penny for drink, made you forget fierce cold. The escape was called “jack-rolling.” Men fought then for the sheer sake of fighting. Two hungry men in an alley, at night, clasped in each other’s arms amid garbage and ashes, biting, kicking, sweating in terror—so that one could laugh in relief when the other lay senseless; so that one could look down and see dark blood bubbling above torn lips, and know that it was he who had brought the blood up in that throat, and that it was he who had torn those lips. But the men of the jungle never spoke of jack-rolling save in jest. Hunger had taught them silence as well as haste.
Oh I met a man the other day I never met before,
He asked me if I wished a job a-shovelin’ iron ore.
When I asked him how much he would pay, he said twelve cents a load,
I said, go ’long old feller—I’d ruther stay on the road.
“Ah’d like to get out of this pesthole,” Cass thought. “Ah’d like to see Fort Worth an’ Waco.”
Cass was fifteen in 1926. He was lank, like his brother Bryan, red-haired like his sister, and he was already somewhat cave-chested. When Cass walked, he slouched. When he stood stiff he sometimes cocked his head to one side, like a long-legged fighting cock, and then he looked as though he had not laughed four times in all his life. A gaunt and lugubrious lout. He had gone to school long enough to learn how to read and write, but then the school board had hired a teacher who was half-Mexican, and Stub had taken Cass out in protest. The teacher was still in the school, so Cass had never returned.
Cass could feel his body growing, it was groaning and strainng and stretching. There was a great travail within him, a great toiling and laboring, as though an oak were sprouting in his vitals.
Sometimes strength would surge through him in a tide, and then he would run aimlessly and shout at nothing at all.
In his mind, too, was a growing. A sudden light would flash within his brain illuminating earth and sky—a common bush would become a glory, a careless sparrow on a swinging bough a wonder to behold; and then the light would fade and fade, like a slow gray curtain dropping.
Some moments were irretrievable.
One day in March he raised his eyes from play and saw a solitary sapling on a hill, bending before the wind against a solid wall of blue; and it seemed to him that it had not been there before he had looked up and would vanish as soon as he turned. Many times after that time Cass looked at the same slender shoot; never again did he see it so truly.
In a sense it had vanished.
At times he could catch Nancy in one of these strange life-glimpses. One second she would be moving about the kitchen, his sister about her familiar tasks, and the next she would be a total stranger, doing he knew not what. There would be a picture of her in his mind then—not moving, but rigid, tensed with life and still as death. He would be afraid and bewildered.
And then there was the lilac—that spring-time when it bloomed. It grew by day against a fence, and it bloomed at night, in rain. Cass waited each day for its blooming; each night he smelled it from where he slept. Every morning he brushed its buds of soot that trains had left in the night; each day he watered it. He had watched it every day, and he had seen:
That it grew out of dust and yearned toward sky; that it seemed half-asleep in the early morning, but that it became restless as day grew toward night; that when east-wind passed it shuddered in joy as though unseen hands were stroking its buds; and that whenever the sun was directly overhead the whole plant, even to its tiniest twigs, seemed bending a little in pain.
And one night Cass awoke, and heard a small rain on the dooryard dust, and he smelled a velvet-dark smell. It came to him on the smell of rain, and he heard the tapping of drops on the roof overhead. Behind a thin curtain he heard his sister’s low breathing; and knew she slept with her hair for a pillow.
Then the velvet smell made a purple image in his brain; his throat seemed to swell with the wild-dark odor. In the yard dust caught between his toes and the light rain flecked his face. Above his head night-clouds hung, heavily brooding. And the smell from the dooryard’s corner drew him as powerfully as though a woman waited him there: he traced the texture of lilac leaves as though touching a young girl’s breasts for the first time. He closed his eyes; his fingers wandered wantonly, to stroke that delicate blooming.
The lilac was blooming in the night.
Cass buried his face deep in lilac-leaf that time, and his heart pained, first trembling a little, then swelling slow.
That was in the springtime when the lilac bloomed, but it never bloomed for him again.
Often in the evenings of that spring and summer he would become uneasy and restless; he would begin to walk because, of a sudden, it would seem hard to stand still. His spindling shanks would start clipping along like a great pair of shears, ever faster and faster, till the walk became a run and the run became a race—then something would give within, and he would be tired, tired. He would return slowly, feeling troubled and strangely dissatisfied. Utterly exhausted, he would climb into bed with his brother.
Then such dreams as he would have! Once he was atop the utmost peak of the highest mountain on earth, clouds and storm winds breaking about him, snow-gales sweeping down. He was naked, and he was laughing—he was not cold among these snows. And everything was so wild and strong that when he woke in the morning he was sickened by the sights and sounds and smells of the house: the stains of Stubby’s spittle and Bryan’s cut-plug tobacco juice dried in brown globs against the wall; the sweaty, yellowish smell of unclean bedclothes beneath him, and the sour smells from the kitchen. The work-a-day world was a sorry place compared to what Cass knew in dreams.
Yet once he dreamed he was walking softly down a dark and narrow way where little blue lights burned all in a row. Black-cowled children stood in darkened doorways as he passed, and he walked ever softer and softer, for everything about this street seemed strange. Then all the little blue lights went out at once, there was no light anywhere in the world, and he woke. And that time it was good to see the work-a-day world once more; Cass felt, somehow, that on that night he had come close to death.
He did not always dream. Sometimes he lay awake beside his sleeping brother, wondering, filled with an adolescent yearning, imagining all manner of far-away places. He saw broad blue waters and woody places, pleasant cities where children played. Sometimes as he lay so Nancy would laugh lowly out of sleep, and he would be recalled from wonder. Then he would think of his father, how Stuart rode switch engines all through the mysterious night. He would think of his father, how, in the chill, smoky mornings, he would come in while Cass was dressing by the wood stove, tracking soot and cinders and sand into the kitchen on his pointed little brown Spanish boots, dangling an empty tin dinner pail from his hand.
In after years Cass never heard the long thunder of passenger cars over a bridge in the dark, but he caught a brief glimpse of a smoky dawn through an opening door; never saw the white steam whistle in the light, but he saw his lather stretched, mouth agape, on the disarranged cot in the corner, brown boot-toes pointing upward.
And in after years Cass always feared a night of storm or wind. On such nights, as a boy, he heard something, or someone, come stealing through darkness out on the road; he heard cold fingers tap along the west wall, wind-fingers trying the knob, then, whispering something quickly, something
