The Morning and the Evening Read Free Page A

to run. The owner grabbed him by his crossed straps and one sleeve, dragged him down the light beam through the aisle of snickering faces, and out into the night. “God damn you, loon,” he muttered.
    Jake pulled back toward the tent, but the man shook him hard; then Jake forgot about the tent. He stood bewildered, with the man’s face breathing close to his. “You’re not getting back in there,” the owner gritted out between his teeth.
    With no thought left of what was inside the tent, Jake stood limply while the owner held him. Finally the owner released him and lit a cigarette, stood facing him, waiting to overcome his anger. “Just God damn you,” he said as he drew on the cigarette, which glowed faintly red against his face in the dark.
    And this faint red glow stirred up, as much as possible, a memory in Jake. When he had seen the owner with the spotlight playing across his face, he had associated it with the one thing of color indelibly etched on his mind—the sunset—because he watched it daily, and now he knew that he had seen this face before with color on it. He began to tell the man. “Take your hands off me. Get on away,” the owner said, giving him a good shove before he threw away his cigarette and went on back into the tent.
    Jake turned after him, knew from the tone of his voice not to follow, and stood holding on to the outside fold of the tent flap, beginning to tell the man about the sun going down red against a darkening sky. In a little while someone stuck his head out. “Shut up that noise and go home,” he said, and while the tent flap was open Jake glimpsed a man and a girl, heard music, saw a horse with its mane waving in the wind; then he was staring at nothing, with his nose up against the closed flap of the tent.
    He turned, ran his hand over his nose where the rough tent had scratched it, and went on slowly down the faint road. The moon came out smiling from behind a cloud, opened up a white path; he followed it, listening to the staccato sounds from katydids hiding in the tall grass alongside the road, listening to the shrill loud screaming of locusts from somewhere overhead, listening to the stumbling craunch of his own feet on the gravel, all sounds.
    Alone, he began to call up words from way inside him. A bird fluttered in one of the poplar trees, and he looked for it between the white leaves. It sang sleepily way up, and he went on. He went instinctively, not having to think where he was going. Because it was quiet the words came easily but formed slowly, one by one, and he waited for them to come as he walked.
    When he had been in the quiet for about a mile, he began to remember: music. He stored up words to go with the music. After a while he remembered the horse, and he stored up words to go with the horse. He remembered the wind.
    He turned out of the moonlight and went through the dark again, his feet following surely the thin side road.
    When he saw the little house, with one lighted window, he went up to it and looked inside. A woman knelt by a bed, and he watched her. As she stood up and got into bed, he saw without surprise that it was his mother and knew he was home. His mother sat in the bed by the lamp and he knew she was waiting for him. He waited, watching her. The night sounds continued around him; they had become part of his hearing now, and he did not have to listen to them consciously. With the sounds around him, with the words inside him, he felt again the uncontrollable thing that guided him, and he wanted to make sounds too. He moved his hands out in a sweeping gesture, stood outside the window, nodded his head up and down, shook it once.
    But the words still stirred him, wanting to be said. Suddenly he found himself going away from the window, and he went, went as if he were following himself.
    He went quietly through the tall, dew-wet grass, felt it itch his leg, but he forgot it before he could remember to stop