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Show 121 touch. He had been one of the night-shirted children in the other story, and in his cups he loved to describe that distant grey spring morning when he had peered under an older brother's elbow through the bedroom window and seen his father penetrate the lilacs, round a corner of the house only to appear moments later from the other side, round the corner again, his bearded face raised to inspect the eaves, and finally race past the window in the opposite direction before coming in and herding all the brothers and sisters into the front room to kneel in a circle that warped to avoid a wet spot on the carpet and pray. He had accepted, as children will, the story of the visitation by the dead sister he had never met. By his early teens, doubt had set in, and with young manhood and the discovery of vices had come resentment that his childish gullibility had been taken advantage of. In his middle years he had become a fixture in Randolph, smoking his pipe in his undershirt and snickering at the neighbors who passed his front porch on Sunday mornings on their way to church. His poor wife complained to the bishop, the bishop spoke gently to the uncle, the uncle slapped the wife around, dared the stake president to excommunicate him, and told his doughty mother that everything they told her about him was lies. It broke his mother's heart, but in the end he was to know a prodigy too. He was asleep one night in his drunkard's bed (his wife slept in a different room), and woke to the sound of something creeping through the trash on the floor. He opened one eye and felt his heart stop. A man had just come out of the wall carrying a brass horn. It was a young man, with reddish hair frayed around the ears and a thick lower lip. His shoulders were hunched as he picked his steps carefully through the litter of newspapers, rags, bottles and pieces of cardboard box, and plates with dried food on them strewn across the floor, making his way to the bed where |
