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Show HI THE BULL-359 made him nervous and when he saw the old bull standing in the middle of die corral chewing his cud as calmly as if he was timeless, immortal, die man glared at him in fierce contradiction, almost in rage. He had told himself the spilled coffee was just anodier of his son's stupid errors but he had gained control over himself only slowly. Simple pain he could deal with; it was familiar and sometimes exciting. If he hit his thumb with a hammer he could hold on to himself, hold on to his wrist and work his moudi over senseless words (he never cursed), the words spinning a thin barrier which kept the pain from submerging his will. Then, with such control, he could manipulate the pain as precisely as a lever, pushing it away, drawing it close. But this shock to his nerves he could neither control nor endure, much less enjoy; it was too much a part of those intangibles in life which he both hated and feared, those unseen forces at work widiin him and abroad in the world which maddened him as diey continually slipped from his grasp. He had spent his life fighting the strange promptings he felt within himself. Instead of listening to them, under the stern silent demanding eyes of his father, alert to the cold crystal of his mother's injunctions, he had listened to the duty-call of the world. But he had hated it and so had married for redemption, only to find that her gentleness was timidity, her warmth nothing but youth. Each of them had yearned for affection in the other, for green lust, for simple, human touching, only to find that neither could give, and so dieir deepest yearning had shrunk back to fit the pattern of duty. But he could never forgive her for the failure her mute and passive flesh had charged him with, slowly love had crystallized into hate, and now he lived with a constant resentful rage. He no longer touched his wife, duty forbad that he touch any other flesh, and in time he had come to suspect even that his son was not of his seed - or rather that his seed had somehow gotten overwhelmed and that the boy was hers alone. But those thoughts drove him mad. And he had felt something like madness rising in him that morning while the coffee cooled on his jeans, die cold as cutting as a knife blade, and so he had stood abrupdy from his log and had tossed the coffee from his cup in a black arc. To move, to work! |
