Going to Meet the Man Read Free

wide open and body held rigid: and who now, at his father’s touch, remembered the height, the sharp, sliding rock beneath his feet, the sun, the explosion of the sun, his plunge into darkness and his salty blood; and recoiled, beginning to scream, as his father touched his forehead. “Hold still, hold still,” crooned his father, shaking, “hold still. Don’t cry. Daddy ain’t going to hurt you, he just wants to see this bandage, see what they’ve done to his little man.” But Roy continued to scream and would not be still and Gabriel dared not lift the bandage for fear of hurting him more. And he looked at Elizabeth in fury: “Can’t you put that child down and help me with this boy? John, take your baby sister from your mother—don’t look like neither of you got good sense.”
    John took Delilah and sat down with her in the easy chair. His mother bent over Roy, and held him still, while his father, carefully—but still Roy screamed—lifted the bandage and stared at the wound. Roy’s sobs began to lessen. Gabriel readjusted the bandage. “You see,” said Elizabeth, finally, “he ain’t nowhere near dead.”
    “It sure ain’t your fault that he ain’t dead.” He and Elizabeth considered each other for a moment in silence. “He came mightly close to losing an eye. Course, his eyes ain’t as big as your’n, so I reckon you don’t think it matters so much.” At thisher face hardened; he smiled. “Lord, have mercy,” he said, “you think you ever going to learn to do right? Where was you when all this happened? Who let him go downstairs?”
    “Ain’t nobody let him go downstairs, he just went. He got a head just like his father, it got to be broken before it’ll bow. I was in the kitchen.”
    “Where was Johnnie?”
    “He was in here?”
    “Where?”
    “He was on the fire escape.”
    “Didn’t he know Roy was downstairs?”
    “I reckon.”
    “What you mean, you reckon? He ain’t got your big eyes for nothing, does he?” He looked over at John. “Boy, you see your brother go downstairs?”
    “Gabriel, ain’t no sense in trying to blame Johnnie. You know right well if you have trouble making Roy behave, he ain’t going to listen to his brother. He don’t hardly listen to me.”
    “How come you didn’t tell your mother Roy was downstairs?”
    John said nothing, staring at the blanket which covered Delilah.
    “Boy, you hear me? You want me to take a strap to you?”
    “No, you ain’t,” she said. “You ain’t going to take no strap to this boy, not today you ain’t. Ain’t a soul to blame for Roy’s lying up there now but you—you because you done spoiled him so that he thinks he can do just anything and get away with it. I’m here to tell you that ain’t no way to raise no child. You don’t pray to the Lord to help you do better than you been doing, you going to live to shed bitter tears that the Lord didn’t take his soul today.” And she was trembling. She moved, unseeing, toward John and took Delilah from his arms. She looked back at Gabriel, who had risen, who stood near thesofa, staring at her. And she found in his face not fury alone, which would not have surprised her; but hatred so deep as to become insupportable in its lack of personality. His eyes were struck alive, unmoving, blind with malevolence—she felt, like the pull of the earth at her feet, his longing to witness her perdition. Again, as though it might be propitiation, she moved the child in her arms. And at this his eyes changed, he looked at Elizabeth, the mother of his children, the helpmeet given by the Lord. Then her eyes clouded; she moved to leave the room; her foot struck the lunchbox lying on the floor.
    “John,” she said, “pick up your father’s lunchbox like a good boy.”
    She heard, behind her, his scrambling movement as he left the easy chair, the scrape and jangle of the lunchbox as he picked it up, bending his dark head near the toe of his father’s heavy shoe.

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