| OCR Text |
Show 61 been more. He had scarcely a moment to collect his thoughts before a hand gripped him by the hair and began to thump his head against the ridge of soil. Lorin had avoided fights all his life because of his spindliness, and the one or two he had been unable to avoid had ended by embarrassing him. He had never understood the distinction between spindliness and wiriness except that wiry people were never embarrassed in fights and spindly people always were. Wiry people could even take their shirts off and not be laughed at. The pounding of his head against the ground was making his brain go silly. He would have been happy to give up, but he was not sure he had that privilege. He wished he had not heard the pop in his elbow, because he knew he was going to worry about tissue damage. He was already wondering how he would explain a torn ligament to his father, who would ascribe it to malingering, when the hammerlock was released and he felt himself picked up by the shirt collar and the seat of his overalls, which gave him a stab of pain as the seam was pulled tight across his crotch, and shaken like a dustmop. He remembered to keep his mouth closed so his teeth would not chip against each other, and when the loose white sleeve of the robe snapped like a towel in front of his face once he quickly shut both eyes. The splotches of colored light swimming against his eyelids alarmed him because he was afraid something had shaken loose during the pounding of his head against the ground, and he dreaded that when he opened his eyes he would see only curtains of blood start to run down, coating the retina. He opened them carefully and was grateful to see the hole he had uncovered and the boulder at the edge of it, the grassy edge of the hill he had climbed, the distant valley below him, where brown pastures were studded by clean white farm buildings, and a distant windmill grinding slowly in the wind, all vibrating at an angle but clean and distinct. When he was flung back onto the ground and felt his ribs kicked repeatedly it was pleasing to think he had something |
