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She did not look up at him. Silently he took her arm and began to walk.
Looking at her pale feet, she went with him to the edge of the cool ravine and down to the silent flow of the stream, to the moss banks and the willows.
He hesitated. She almost looked up to see if he was still there. They had come into the light, and she kept her head turned away so that he saw only the blowing darkness of her hair and the whiteness of her arms.
He said, “You don’t have to come any further, you know. Which house did you come from? You can run back to wherever it is. But if you run, don’t ever come back; I won’t want to see you again. I couldn’t take any more of this, night after night. Now’s your chance. Run, if you want!”
Summer night breathed off her, warm and quiet.
Her answer was to lift her hand to him.
Next morning, as Hattie walked downstairs, she found Grandma, Aunt Maude, and Cousin Jacob with cold cereal in their tight mouths, not liking it when Hattie pulled up her chair. Hattie wore a grim, high-necked dress, with a long skirt. Her hair was a knotted, hard bun behind her ears, her face was scrubbed pale, clean of color in the cheeks and lips. Her painted eyebrows and eyelashes were gone. Her fingernails were plain.
“You’re late, Hattie,” they all said, as if an agreement had been made to say it when she sat down.
“I know.” She did not move in her chair.
“Better not eat much,” said Aunt Maude. “It’s eight-thirty. You should’ve been at school. What’ll the superintendent say? Fine example for a teacher to set her pupils.”
The three stared at her.
Hattie was smiling.
“You haven’t been late in twelve years, Hattie,” said Aunt Maude.
Hattie did not move, but continued smiling.
“You’d better go,” they said.
Hattie walked to the hall to take down her green umbrella and pinned on her ribboned flat straw hat. They watched her. She opened the front door and looked back at them for a long moment, as if about to speak, her cheeks flushed. They leaned toward her. She smiled and ran out, slamming the door.
Thunder in the Morning
At first it was like a storm, far away, a touch of thunder, a kind of wind and a stirring. The streets had been emptied by the courthouse clock. People had looked at the great white clock face hours ago, folded their newspapers, got up from the porch swings, hooked themselves into their summer night houses, put out the lights, and settled into cool beds. All this the clock had done, just standing above the courthouse green. Now there was not a thing on the street. Overhead street lights, casting down illumination, made shines upon the asphalt. On occasion a leaf would break loose from a tree and clatter down. The night was so dark you could not see the stars. Why this was so there was no way of telling. Except that everyone’s eyes were closed and that way no stars were seen, that’s how dark the night was. Oh, here and there, behind a window screen, if one peered into a dark room, one might see a red point of light, nothing else; some man sitting up to feed his insomnia with nicotine, rocking in a slow rocker in the dark room. You might hear a small cough or someone turn under the sheets. But on the street there was not even a policeman swinging along with his club pointed to the earth in one hand.
From far away the small thunder began. First it was far across town. You could hear it across the ravine, going along the street over there, three blocks away across the deep blackness. It took a direction, it made square cuts, this sound of thunder, then it crossed over the ravine on the Washington Street bridge, under the owl light, and turned a corner and—there it was, at the head of the street!
And with a whiskering, brushing, sucking noise down the street between the houses and trees came the thundering metal cleaning machine of Mr. Britt. It was a tornado, funneling, driving, whispering, murmuring, feeling of the street ahead of it with big whirl-around brushes like sewer lids with rotary brushes under them, spinning, with a big rolling-pin brush turning under all the scattered trivia of the world’s men, the ticket stubs from that show at the Elite tonight, and the wrapper from a chewing gum stick that now rested on top of a bureau in one of the houses, a small chewed cannonball of tasteless elasticity, and the candy wrapper from a bar now hidden and folded into the small accordion innards of a boy high in a cupola house in a magic room. All these things, streetcar trransfers to Chessman Park, to Live Oak Mortuary, to North Chicago, to Zion City, giveaway handbills on hairdos at that new chromium shop on Central. All these were whiskered up by the immense moving mustache of the machine, and on top of the machine, like a great god, in his leather-metal saddle, sat Mr. Roland Britt, age thirty-seven, the strange age between yesterday and tomorrow, and he, in his way, was a duplicate of the machine upon which he rode, with his proud hands on the steering wheel. He had a little curly mustache over his mouth, and little curly hairs that seemed to rotate upon his scalp under the passing lamps, and a little sucking nose that was continually astonished with the world, sucking it all in and blowing it out the astonished mouth. And he had hands that were always taking things and never giving at all. He and the machine, very much the same. They hadn’t begun that way. Britt had never started to be like the machine. But after you rode it awhile it got up through your rump and spread through your system until your digestion roiled and your heart spun like a small pink top in you. But, on the other hand, neither had the machine intended being like Britt. Machines change also, and become like their masters, in imperceptible ways.
The machine was gentler than it used to be under an Irishman named Reilly. They sailed down the midnight streets together, through little streams of water ahead of them to dampen the trivia before combing it into its gullet. It was like a whale, with a mouth full of bristle, swimming in the moonlight seas, slaking in ticket minnows and gum-wrapper minnows, feeding and feeding in the silvery school of confetti that lived in the shallows of the asphalt river. Mr. Britt felt like a Greek god, even with his concave chest, bringing gentle April showers with him with the sprinklers, cleansing the world of dropped sin.
Halfway up Elm Road, whiskers bristling, great mustache hungrily eating of the street, Mr. Britt, in a fit of sport, swerved his great storm machine from one side of the street to the other, just so he could suck up a rat.
“Got him!”
Mr. Britt had seen the large running gray thing, leprous and horrible, skittering across under a lamp flare. Whisk! And the foul rodent was now inside the machine, being digested by smothering tides of paper and autumn leaf.
He went on down the lonely rivers of night, bringing and taking his storm with him, leaving fresh-whisked and wetted marks behind him.
“Me and my magical broomstick,” he thought. “Me a male witch riding under the autumn moon. A good witch. The good witch of the East; wasn’t that it, from the old Oz book when I was six with whooping cough in bed?”
He passed over innumerable hopscotch squares which had been made by children drunk with happiness, they were so crooked. He sucked up red playbills and yellow pencils and dimes and sometimes quarters.
“What was that?”
He turned upon his seat and looked behind.
