Time Will Darken It Read Free

intentions; but instead of telling him how she felt, she waited, and when the Pottershad arrived and it was too late for him to do anything about it, she made a scene behind the closed bedroom door, showered him with accusations (some just, some unjust), said that he didn’t love her or he couldn’t possibly have done such a thing when she was in no condition to have a house full of company, and then withdrew her support, leaving him to manage as best he could. To add to Austin’s difficulties, she was ill in a way that she hadn’t been before Ab was born; she was subject to morning sickness, making him feel that he had been unfair not only towards her but also towards the Potters, who should have been told, he now realized. They should at least have been given a chance not to come.
    The footsteps stopped.
    “Will there be any children for me to play with?” Ab asked.
    Austin said, “No, this is a grown-up party and you mustn’t interrupt people when they are talking, do you hear? Just be quiet and watch, and afterwards everybody will say, ‘What a nice little girl.’ ”
    He gave his daughter a pat on the behind and then, stepping over a doll’s bed and a house of alphabet blocks, left her and went back into the bedroom across the hall.

2
    Elm Street, the street the Kings lived on, had been finished for almost a generation when the Potters arrived for their visit. The shade had encroached gradually upon the areas of sunlight, and the outermost branches of the trees—maples and elms, cottonwoods, lindens and box elders—had managed to meet in places over the brick pavement. The houses reflected no set style or period of architecture, but only apleasure in circular bay windows, wide porches, carpenter’s lace, and fresh white paint. Elm Street led nowhere in particular and there was never much traffic on it. The most exciting vehicle that passed on a summer day was the ice-cream wagon, painted white, its slow progress announced by a silvery
ka-ling, ka-ling, ka-ling
that brought children running to the kerb. The ice-cream wagon was the high point of the monumental July or August afternoon, and much of its importance came from the fact that it was undependable. The children often waited for it in vain, their only consolation the chips that fell from the iceman’s pick. There were also gypsy wagons, but they were infrequent, not to be expected more than once or twice a summer. When they did come, the smaller children, clutching their playthings, withdrew to their own front porches where, in safety, they stood and stared until the caravan of five or six covered wagons had passed by.
    For a street only three unbroken blocks long—Elm Street below the intersection was another world entirely—there were an unusual number of children and it was they who gave the street its active character and its air of Roman imperishability. In feature and voice and attitude they were small copies of the women who shook dustcloths out of upstairs windows and banged mops on porch railings, of the men who came home from work in the late afternoon and stood in their shirt-sleeves dampening the lawns and flower beds with a garden hose. But for a time, for as long as they were children, they were almost as free as the sparrows.
    With two alleys and any number of barns, pigeon houses, chicken coops, woodsheds, and sloping cellar doors (all offering excellent hiding and sliding places to choose from, all in the public domain), the children seldom left the street to play.
    In the daytime boys and girls played apart, but evening brought them all together in a common dislike of the dark and of their mother’s voice calling them home. They playedgames, some of which were older than Columbus’ voyages. They caught lightning bugs and put them in a bottle. They frightened themselves with ghost stories. They hid from and hunted one another, in and out of the shrubbery. For the grown people relaxing on their porches after the heat of the day,