Jordan County Read Free

put his coat on. Presently, when the nurse had finished her comic book —
Bat Man
was its title; she seemed to have derived small pleasure from it — she rose and beckoned to the little girl. “Time for your nap,” she said. Leaving by way of the arch they passed a man who walked bent forward, leaning on a cane. As he drew closer Pauly saw that he was old and there was pain in his face. Then he saw Pauly and turned aside, taking the bench where the nurse had read through
Bat Man
. He sat with the cane planted stiffly between his shoes, both hands on the crook, and his face was empty except for the lines of pain.
    The sun was past the overhead. Pauly rose abruptly andwent to the old man’s bench. From closer he saw that he was poor as well as old. His shoes were broken and there were holes in the ankles of his cotton socks. The cuffs of his shirt were badly frayed, as was the collar, and where the button was missing the points bunched forward, overlapping the knot of his tie, which had been tied and re-tied so often in the same place that the knot looked as tight and hard as a little piece of gravel. His coat, loose-fitting and almost as rumpled as Pauly’s own, gave him a scarecrow aspect. When he turned his head Pauly saw that the pain was old, like the rest of him; he had lived with it for years. “How do,” he said.
    “Hello. Could I sit down and talk?”
    “All right.”
    Pauly sat beside him on the bench, and again that stiff-lipped expression came onto his face. “Ive been trying to figure,” he said. He paused and the old man watched him, unsurprised. “I came back from the war and all, back here where I was born and raised, and people dont even know me on the street. I see things all around me and it tears me up inside. A letter on the sidewalk, say, from a teen-age girl reaching out for love and already knowing she wont find it … Sad things, terrible things happen to people! Do you realize that right this minute there are people all over the world crying, weeping, lying awake in their beds at night, smoking cigarettes till their gums are sore, and looking up at the ceiling like they thought theyd find the answer written there? Kicked in the teeth, insulted, full of misery the way a glass can get so full it bulges at the brim with surface tension — what does it mean? What does it mean? It’s got to mean something, all that suffering.”
    “It’s just people, the way they are,” the old man said. For a moment he was quiet. Then he added: “They got away from God.”
    “God? Whats God got to do with it? What does He care?”
    “Maybe they just werent meant to be happy, then.”
    “No! Thats not true!” Pauly jerked his hands as he spoke,clenching and unclenching his fists. “I want to live in the world but I dont understand, and until I can understand I cant live. Why wont people be happy? Not cant:
wont
.”
    “I dont know,” the old man said. He looked away, across the park. “Ive been here going on eighty-seven years and I dont know. My wife died of a cancer until finally all that was left was teeth and eyes and yelling, like some animal. I asked myself all those things: ‘What does it mean? What does it mean?’ Then she died. She’d been a beautiful woman in her day, and she wound up like a run-over cat. I asked myself, again and again: ‘What does it mean? What does it mean?’ And you know, I finally found the answer; one answer, anyhow. It dont mean a thing. Nothing. Why should it mean anything? I stopped thinking about it is what I finally did. It’s what you better do, too. Dont think about it. Theyll lock you up, you keep at it too long. They wanted to lock me up, down at Whitfield, but I quit thinking about it and they let me alone. Now they say I’m harmless. And I am.”
    The stiff-lipped expression had turned to horror; Pauly jumped up. He was about to speak, but then instead he turned and walked away. Near the entrance he looked back. The old man was just sitting