all around, daughters, ransoms, their yard ended at the first sandbank which was the one I was pelting with pitching rocks the day I met Dicky Hampshire —and the other way ending on Riverside in a steep cliff) (my intelligent Richard Hampshire)— I saw Doctor Sax the night of the Big Parade in the sand, somebody was convoying a squad to the right flank and being forced to take cover, I was reconnoitering with views at the scenery for possible suspects and trees, and there’s Doctor Sax grooking in the desert plateau of timbers in brush, the all-stars of Whole World strung up behind him à la bowl, meadows and apple trees as a background horizon, clear pure night, Doctor Sax is watching our pathetic sand game with an inscrutable silence– I look once, I look, he vanisheth on falling horizons in a bat… what great difference was there between Count Condu and Doctor Sax in my childhood?
Dicky Hampshire introduced me to a possible difference … we started drawing cartoons together, in my house at my desk, in his house in his bedroom with kid brother watching (just like Paddy Sorenson’s kid brother watching me and Paddy drawing 4-year-old cartoons–abstract as hell–as the Irish washingmachine wrangles and the old Irish grandfather puffs on his clay upsidedown pipe, on Beaulieu Street, my first “English” chum)— Dicky Hampshire was my greatest English chum, and he was English. Strangely, his father had an old Chandler car in the yard, year ‘29 or ‘21, probably ‘21, wood spokes, like some wrecks you find in the Dracut woods smelling of shit and all sagged down and full of rotten apples and dead and all ready to sprout out of the earth a new car plant, some kind of Terminus pine plant with sagging oil gums and rubber teeth and an iron source in the center, a Steel tree, an old car like that is often seen but rarely intact, although it wasn’t running. Dicky’s father worked in a printing plant on a canal, just like my father … the old Citizen newspaper that went out —blue with mill rags in the alleys, cotton dust balls and smoke pots, litter, I walk along the long sunny concrete rale of the millyards in the booming roar of the windows where my mother’s working, I am horrified by the cotton dresses of the women rushing out of the mills at five–the women work too much! they’re not home any more! They work more than they ever worked!— Dicky and I covered these millyards and agreed millwork was horrible. “What I’m going to do instead is sit around the green jungles of Guatemala.”
“Watermelon?”
“No, no, Guatemala–my brother s going there—”
We drew cartoons of jungle adventures in Guatemala. Dicky’s cartoons were very good–he drew slower than I did– We invented games. My mother made caramel pudding for both of us. He lived up Phebe across the sandbank. I was the Black Thief, I put notes in his door.
“Beware, Tonight the Black Thief will Strike Again. Signed, the Black Thief!!!”-and off I’d flit (in broad daylight planting notes). At night I came in my cape and slouch hat, cape made of rubber (my sister’s beach cape of the thirties, red and black like Mephistopheles), hat is old slouch hat I have … (later I wore great big felt hats all level to imitate Alan Ladd This Gun for Hire, at 19, so what’s silly)— I glided to Dicky’s house, stole his bathing trunks from the porch, left a note on the rail under a rock, “The Black Thief Has Struck.”- Then I’d run-then I’d in the daytime stand with Dicky and the others.
“I wonder who that Black Thief is?”
“I think he lives on Gershom, that’s what I think.”
“It might be,—it might be,—then again–I dunno.”
I’m standing there speculating. For some odd reason having to do with his personal psychological position (psyche) Dicky became terrified of the Black Thief–he began to believe in the sinister and heinous aspects of the deal —of the–secretive—perfectly silent–action. So sometimes I’d see him and break his will with stories— “On Gershom he’s stealing radios, crystal sets, stuff in barns—”
“What’ll he steal from me next? I lost my hoop, my pole vault, my trunks, and now my brother’s wagon … my wagon.”
All these articles were hidden in my cellar, I was going to return them quite as mysteriously as they disappeared —at least so I told myself. My cellar was particularly evil. One afternoon Joe Fortier had cut off the head of a fish in it, with an ax, just because we caught the fish and couldn’t eat it as it was an old dirty sucker from the river (Merrimac of Mills)—boom–crash—I saw stars–I hid the loot there, and had a secret dusty airforce made of cross-beam sticks with crude nail landing gears and a tail all hid in the old coal bin, ready for pubertical war (in case I got tired of the Black Thief) and so–I had a light dimly shining down (a flashlight through a cloth of black and blue, thunder) and this shone dumb and ominous on me in my cape and hat as outside the concrete cellar windows redness of dusk turned purple in New England and the kids screamed, dogs screamed, streets screamed, as elders dreamed, and in the back fences and violet lots I skipped in a flowing cape guile through a thousand shadows each more potent than the other till I got (skirting Dicky’s house to give him a rest) to the Ladeaus’ under the sandbank streetlamp where 1 threw surreptitious pebbles among their skippity hops in the dirt road (on cold November sunnydays the sand dust blew on Phebe like a storm, a drowsy storm of Arabic winter in the North)—the Ladeaus searched the hills of sand for this Shadow-this thief-this Sax incarnate pebblethrower —didn’t find him–I let go my “Mwee hee hee ha ha” in the dark of purple violet bushes, I screamed out of earshot in a dirt mole, went to my Wizard of Oz shack (in Phebe backyard, it had been an old ham-curing or tool-storing shack) and drop’t in through the square hole in the roof, and stood, relaxed, thin, huge, amazing, meditating the mysteries of my night and the triumphs of my night, the glee and huge fury of my night, mwee hee hee ha ha— (looking in a little mirror, flashing eyes, darkness sends its own light in a shroud)— Doctor Sax blessed me from the roof, where he hid–a fellow worker in the void! the black mysteries of the World! Etc! the World Winds of the Universe!—I hid in this dark shack–listening outside–a madness in the bottom of my darkness smile–and gulped with fear. They finally caught me.
Mrs. Hampshire, Dick’s mother, said to me gravely in the eye, “Jack, are you the Black Thief?”
“Yes, Mrs. Hampshire,” I replied immediately, hypnotized by the same mystery that once made her say, when I asked her if Dicky was at home or at the show, in a dull, flat, tranced voice as if she was speaking to a Spiritualist, “Dicky … is … gone … far … away …”
“Then bring back Dicky’s things and tell him you’re sorry.” Which I did, and Dicky was wiping his red wet eyes with a handkerchief.
“What foolish power had I discovered and been possessed by?” I asts meself … and not much later my mother and sister came impatiently marching down the street to fetch me from the Ladeau bushes because they were looking for the beach cape, a beach party was up. My mother said exasperated:
‘I’m going to stop you from reading them damned Thrilling Magazines if it’s the last thing I do (Tu va arretez d’lire ca ste mautadite affaire de fou la, tu m’attend tu?)”—
The Black Thief note I printed, by hand, in ink, thickly, on beautiful scraps of glazed paper I got from my father’s printing shop– The paper was sinister, rich, might have scared Dicky–
21
“I AM TOO FEEBLE TO GO ON,” says the Wizard in the Castle bending over his papers at night.
“Faustus!” cries his wife from the bath, “what are you doing up so late! Stop fiddling with your desk papers and pen quills in the middle of the night, come to bed, the mist is on the air of night lamps, a dewll come to rest your fevered brow at morning,—you’ll lie swaddled in sweet sleep like a lambikin—l’ll hold you in my old
