swooping left, turning right, blood remembering some aeronautic invasion, crying Vrummmmmmmmmmmmm, while Sam and Lewy stood at the fieldâs edge, laughing, clapping, celebrating fantastic catastrophes.
John borrowed a mule from the older boys down at the agi-barn and rode it up to the house, big boots flapping at its slate-colored flanks.
Mama ran out to shake her apron at them. âGet him out of here! Get him out! Boy, what do you think youâre doing? He gets in my Swiss chard and Iâll skin you alive, so help me!â
(Sam had heard her swear like that maybe twice in his life. Thatâs probably why he remembered it.)
The mule jerked to the sideâand John slipped right to the ground. Then Mama started laughing. Splayed on the grass, John was laughing too.
âGet up . . . from there, Johnââ Mama called, between hysteric eruptions. âAnd get him . . . out of here!â while the mule wandered over to the porch steps and ate a hollyhock.
The handsâ exact slant was repeated on the smaller, spherical clockâs four faces.
Sam and Hubert made their way through waves of men and women. Again, Sam the Navigator gazed up at sky-tiles like an overturned sea.
For a moment, not the distant lights of the Pegasus in their gilded starburstsâacross from the balcony at the hallsâ right side, across from Orion above squared pilasters practically without capitalsâbut the gold lines with which Pegasus was drawn, suggested a caricature of Callista Arkadyâs broad, veiled face, but with an ecstatic smile, gazing down.
With some gentleness, as people plunged in echo by, Hubert said: âCome on, Sam,â to bring his eyes down. âWe have to get the train.â
The trainâ
this
trainâwas a subway. They didnât even step outsideto get to it. Going down the stairs, Hubert asked him: âYou got a nickel?â
At the stepsâ bottom, again Sam put his suitcase down, pushed into his pants pocketâfeeling scrape his wrist the ten dollar bill Lucius had told Mama should be safety-pinned there, because Sam was going to New York, where things could happenâto pull out his coins. On his palm, Sam forefingered aside the fifty-cent piece, two dimes, two nickels, and five, six, seven, eight pennies: change from the Coca-Cola heâd bought on the train platform yesterday, which, there, had cost two cents more than at the colored groceryâ
âCome on,â Hubert said. âIâll pay for you. I got twoâcome
on
, Sam! This is New York; you canât dawdle here!â
âIâm
not
dawdling; Iâm looking after my money.â Only he glanced up to see people cascading down the steps, breaking to left and right of him, like water at a rock. Jamming coins back in his pocket, Sam snatched up his suitcase to follow Hubert, who pushed one nickel into the slot ahead, then another into the one beside that. As they hefted the cases over, they were practically pounded through shadowless stiles by the wooden paddles swinging round behind them. âWhat does it do?â Sam looked back, frowning. âWhack you in the butt every time you go in?â
âThatâs just to make sure people like you go and get on with it.â Hubert hurried ahead. âThis way!â he called over his shoulder. âLetâs get the first car!â
Hubert was twenty-three. Last year Hubert had gone to Europe and traveled there four months. When heâd got back, heâd worked in the tobacco fields in Connecticut. This eagerness for the first carâsomething heâd imagine from John or Lewyâwas not what you expected from a big brother about to start his second year in law schoolâall of which Hubert could claim. But with a sister in between, Hubert was his brother nearest Sam in age; perhaps that enthusiasm was what had kept them so close, in spite of it all.
They didnât make the
Ann Voss Peterson, J.A. Konrath