Robley Wilson

When I was twelve the war was still in its first year and
Jimmy Barraclough, who had been our paperboy for as long as
I could remember, enlisted in the Navy and went off to
fight.

"How could that happen?" my mother said to my father.
"He can't be more than sixteen if he's a day."

My father shrugged. He was hidden behind the Evening
Express, probably reading yesterday's Red Sox totals for the
third time--he also read them in the Boston Post and the
Portland Press Herald, both morning papers, as if he thought
his re-readings could multiply the Sox's success when they
won, undo their failure when they lost--and the shrug was
not seen but telegraphed in the movement of the newsprint.

"Only a child," my mother said. She looked at me,
sadly, and reached out to brush my forelock away from my
eyes.

"He looks old enough," my father said. "That's all a
recruiter cares about."

My father had been in the First World War; he enlisted
in the army out of college and was sent to officer candidate
school at Plattsburg. His view of Jimmy's enlistment was
doubly brusque, first because he had some experience of
wartime, and second because he thought my mother was too
sentimental to exercise good judgment in such a matter.

"I think it's a shame," my mother said.

My father lowered the newspaper to look at her. I
never got used to that look; it combined aggravation and
pity and scorn, and though I had seen it many times before,
it always shocked me. When I was very young it had
frightened me because it seemed to say that there was no
more affection between them, and I wondered what might
become of me, left alone in a hard world by loveless
parents. Now that I was older, the fear had only turned to
confusion. My mother seemed to displease my father, but he
did not become angry or abusive; he simply looked at her,
so.

"Well, it is a shame," she repeated. "What if he's
killed?"

"He won't be killed." My father disappeared behind the
Express.

"I hope not." She kissed me gently on the brow.
"Think of his poor mother then."

#

Even though Jimmy Barraclough had no mother--she had "run
off" with a man she worked with in the payroll department of
the Scoggin textile mill, Jimmy told me--I shared my own
mother's hope that he would survive the war. I felt I owed
him a lot, for though he was nearly four years older he was
a sixth grade classmate of mine, and I was one of the few
younger boys whose presence he tolerated. Jimmy was waiting
to be sixteen so that he could legally drop out of school,
and I think my size--I was tall for my age--had something to
do with his tolerance. Everyone else made him seem out of
place, a giant among pygmies, and he must have felt singled
out and oafish in that Edison School classroom presided over
by Mrs. Florence Hardy.

In matters of true wisdom, matters unrelated to
arithmetic and Palmer Method penmanship, Jimmy far
outdistanced me. He had taught me to swear; he had
introduced me to the vocabulary of human anatomy,
particularly the female; he had taught me snappy comebacks--
if somebody said, "Got a match?" you might say, "Yeah, my
feet and your breath"--what my father would have called
"smart remarks," worth a cuff across the face if he ever
heard them.

Once Jimmy had actually shared a cigarette with me--a
Lucky Strike--and though I could not then appreciate the
pleasure of inhaling, the dark green Luckies pack with its
red-disc bull's-eye symbolized for me the world adults lived
in and enjoyed. For all her compassion, my mother would
have been horrified to know how much, and for what, I
admired Jimmy Barraclough.

#

At the end of April, when Jimmy lied about his age and went
away to the Navy, I took over his paper route. The
inheritance was unexpected. True, I had helped him--or he
had let me follow him on the route--many times, especially
on Fridays and Saturdays, collection days, and I think it
was not only that my arithmetic skills were useful to him,
but that I could be more patient with his slower-paying
customers. All but one--a Mrs. Ouellette, who lived on the
first floor of a yellow tenement house on Riverside Avenue--
he seemed relieved for me to attend to.

There was no Mr. Ouellette. Mrs. Ouellette was a
divorced woman, small and plain, whose apartment smelled of
something spoiled. She had at least two small children--we
saw them or heard them whenever we knocked at her door; they
were forever bawling--and she wore a pink housecoat and pink
bedroom slippers coming apart at the seams. Rarely did she
have the money to pay Jimmy and me. Sometimes she would
fetch her purse and make a show of looking through it for
the thirty cents she needed, but more often than not she
would simply look helpless and ask us to come back another
day.

"Come back Sunday," she would say. "I'll have it for
you then."

She must have known that Sunday was the most awkward
day for Jimmy or me to call--though for a long time, call we
did. Eventually, Jimmy seemed to write her off. "Never
mind old Ouellette," he'd say. "I'll collect on my way home
from the Y." The YMCA was on the third floor of the Masonic
Building, but the basement was occupied by Scoggin Square
Billiards and Bowling, and that's what Jimmy meant when he
referred to the Y. It had five pocket-pool tables, one
three-cushion billiards table, four candlepin alleys, and it
was the high school hangout, the place where "the bad boys,"
as my mother referred to them, played Baby Eight--a nickel
on the three and five, a dime on the eight. Sentimental
like my mother, I used to worry that he might be distracted
enough to stop delivering to her, but he kept her on his
books, and then I imagined that some of my own patience had
rubbed off on him.


#

I already had a sort of job, stopping by the Western Union
office in the Hotel Belmont after school, delivering
whatever telegrams had come in that day, but I was paid only
a dime for each telegram and I could never count on a tip
unless I brought especially good news to somebody. Taking
over Jimmy's paper route gave me new status at home, and the
extra money was a large part of that status. My father was
a school teacher--he had gone to Amherst and gotten his
master's in history at Harvard, and for a year when he and
my mother were first married he had taught at a famous prep
school in New Hampshire--but now he was practically
unemployed. He did substitute teaching in the local high
school, but mostly he kept the books for Tony Apollonio, a
Greek who owned two novelty stores--we called them "fruit
stores"--and operated a small trucking business between
Boston and Portland. He was no trained accountant, my
father, but he had a head for figures, a neat hand, and a
polite but abiding interest in dollars and cents. I
supposed he was good at his job for Apollonio. When I was
younger, if I visited him on a Wednesday or Friday, days
when he worked on the books, it seemed to me he was happy--
that he was more accessible to me, more relaxed with me,
than at home.

My mother was a telephone operator all through the
nineteen-thirties and -forties. She never worked full time,
except in the summer when the regular operators took their
vacations, but she worked frequently and probably earned as
much as my father did. I was terribly proud of her.

Sometimes when she was working the day shift I would stop at
the telephone office just before five o'clock and walk home
with her. She let me sit in a high, caned chair beside her,
watching her work until her relief arrived, and I would
admire her competence--how she responded to the rows of pink
and white lights on the board in front of her, drawing from
their storage holes the snakey cords with brass plugs and
punching them into the holes under the lights. She asked
for numbers in an exaggerated, telephone-operator voice--
"Number puh-leeze"--and when she was making a toll call she
recited numbers to other operators in Portland or Boston or
New York in such a way as to deny any mis-hearing: "I'm
calling thuh-REE, NI-yun, NI-yun, Jay-as-in-James." If I
ever had to call home from school, I would mimic my mother,
telling the operator "one, FI-yuv, thuh-REE, M-as-in-Mary,"
and feeling a kinship that is impossible in modern times.

"Is that you, Stevie?" one of them would say. "Your mother
has to work till six today, so she wants you to go straight
home."

#

With Jimmy Barraclough's paper route, of course I inherited
Mrs. Ouellette, and I was determined from the start that I
would not permit the kind of postponement of payment Jimmy
had been willing to tolerate. After all, I told myself to
justify my determination, Mr. Bradbury, the town's newspaper
distributor, gave no extensions to me. I would be exactly
as hard with Mrs. Ouellette as Mr. Bradbury was hard with
me.

For a few weeks I heeded my own advice and was as
persistent as I knew how to be in collecting Mrs.
Ouellette's weekly thirty cents. If she didn't have the
money on Friday, the usual collection day, I stopped again
on Saturday, and if on Saturday she put me off, I was on her
porch, knocking on her screen door, on the following Monday.
I think my doggedness shamed her; she always blushed and
made clumsy apologies when she finally brought out her purse
and gave me money. "I'm awfully sorry," she would say. "I
don't want you to think I'm a piker." I would duck my head
and mumble that I didn't think anything bad about her.
"Sometimes my check is late," she'd say. "Sometimes I don't
get to the bank to deposit it before Friday comes." I
didn't know what might be the source of her checks, or if
indeed there were checks, but I began to imagine Mrs.
Ouellette might be a widow, not a divorcée.

This possibility softened my attitude toward her later
on--widowhood being acceptably tragic, free of the taint
divorce carried in that small New England town--and after a
couple of months I returned to Jimmy Barraclough's pattern.
If Mrs. Ouellette had no money one Friday, I let the matter
go and hoped she would pay me the next. Sometimes she did.
More often when she came to the door she looked at me
sheepishly--the blue of her eyes was pale, like ice, or like
the coarse crepe ribbon my mother bought to decorate our
parlor when the telephone operators had a baby shower--and
put me off again. "I don't know what's wrong with the
mail," she would say. "My check's late again."

Through all of my visits the two little Ouellette kids
were in the kitchen, crawling on the linoleum floor or
tugging at Mrs. Ouellette's ratty-looking housecoat; their
faces were always dirty, and even if they weren't bawling
there would still be a greenish smear of snot shining under
their noses. The kitchen was too warm and smelled of
kerosene from a heater in the corner; something was always
cooking on top of the gas stove--soup, I thought, or some
kind of fishy-smelling chowder. Mrs. Ouellette herself
looked tired and sad to me. She was never really dressed;
if she wasn't in the housecoat, she was in an old blue men's
bathrobe that was out at the elbows, and her hair looked as
if it hadn't been washed or combed in weeks. Now, looking
back, I realize she was a prettier woman than I gave her
credit for at the time--even-featured, with melting blue
eyes and a sweet, generous mouth--but in that first full
year of the war I believe I simply wasn't wise enough to see
past her weariness. To a twelve year old, appearances are
everything.

#

Fairly early in my administration of Jimmy's paper route I
noticed that Mrs. Ouellette was pregnant. Even despite the
looseness and chenille coarseness of the pink housecoat, the
swell of her stomach became more and more obvious, so that
by summer's end she could not have hidden the fact of the
child she carried even if she wanted to. I knew it was
wrong for women without husbands to have babies--never mind
whether the women were widowed or divorced--but it didn't
occur to me to condemn her. I only felt sorry for her,
picturing a third runny-nosed child crawling on the kitchen
floor and imagining the stink of dirty diapers added to the
unpleasant atmosphere of her tenement rooms. All the more
reason--or so I must have thought--not to press for the
weekly thirty cents she owed me.

It was not entirely one-sided, this leniency between
us. As time went on, Mrs. Ouellette changed in gestures and
actions toward me. She was less apologetic about her
failure to pay for the newspaper, more sociable and outgoing
toward me when I knocked at her door. Sometimes she offered
me lemonade or Moxie or, once in a while, iced coffee--which
I always refused because coffee was a drink for adults. We
sat at the kitchen table, the two of us--the Ouellette
children squalling around us--as if we were at an afternoon
tea party, and we talked about the men in our lives. She
told me about Mr. Ouellette, who was not dead, and about his
abandonment of her just before their second child was born,
and I talked at some length about the difficulty of living
up to my father's expectations of me. Probably I was boring
company for her, but she never said so.

It must have been in the course of these Friday
afternoons in Mrs. Ouellette's kitchen that I began to see
that she was not as plain as I had thought. Perhaps it was
the pregnancy that helped transform her, or it may have been
the further sympathy I felt for her being rejected by her
husband. In any case, her face seemed different--the
features livelier, the eyes brighter--during our
discussions. It might have been our subject matter; I had
begun to wonder about the relations between married couples
how they seemed to leave each other in the lurch at
crucial moments of their lives--and I remember one day
confessing to Mrs. Ouellette my fears about my parents. She
seemed amused by me.

"They sound pretty normal to me," she said. "If that's
the worst he gives her--that dirty look--you're in luck."

"I wouldn't want to live by myself," I said.

"No, you wouldn't," she said. "It's no fun, unless you
have something to look forward to."

That was the one time she touched me: reached out one
hand--it seemed terribly small, the fingers pale and
delicate, not a strong hand at all--and brushed the forelock
of hair out of my eyes the way my mother sometimes did.

"Hope," she said to me. "We live on it, even when
there's nothing and no one else."

#

Jimmy Barraclough had been gone only a little more than four
months--it was September of 1942--when the telegram came
saying he'd been killed in the Pacific. I delivered it.

It wasn't the first telegram from the War Department
I'd seen and handled. I'd brought missing-in-action
messages to three or four families since the start of the
war, and a couple of wounded-in-actions, and I'd even had an
earlier killed-in-action that I delivered to a house on
Ridgeway Avenue, a neighborhood where some of the wealthy
mill executives lived. But until the telegram about Jimmy,
I hadn't personally known the people affected. Also, I'd
always put the bad news into the hands of the mothers of the
soldiers and sailors--the fathers were at work in the
afternoons, and in Scoggin the mothers didn't begin to do
men's jobs in the textile mills or the shoe factory or at
the Navy Yard in Kittery until later in the war--so that if
I wasn't exactly comfortable with their moaning and weeping,
at least I knew what to expect, and I didn't stay around any
longer than I had to. Once they'd signed for the telegram,
I was away, leaving them alone with their grief.

Because Jimmy's mother had gone off with another man,
the address on the telegram didn't include her name. The
news came to "Mr. Frank Barraclough, c/​o Miller," Miller
being the last name of the woman Jimmy's dad had moved in
with after Jimmy went off to enlist.

Frank Barraclough was a local hero. When he graduated
from high school he'd had a tryout with the Red Sox, had
signed a contract with them for a bonus that was rumored to
have been a thousand dollars, and actually played in the
minor leagues for a couple of Sox farm teams in the late
nineteen-twenties. In his last year with the Sox, he played
for their Pawtucket farm team, but halfway through the
season he was hit in the face by a pitch. After that, he
was a changed man. He'd been a sensational shortstop--my
father told me all this as we sat outside Apollonio's store
during his lunch hour, on one of the rare occasions when he
and I found ourselves interested in the same topic--and he
was famous for his ability to go to his right and make
miracle throws to first without planting his feet. "Fancy"
was his nickname; he was a cinch to be called up to the
majors the following year, my father said, "if Fate hadn't
intervened."

"Fancy Frank" Barraclough played ball for Robertson's
Ready-Mix Concrete & Cinder Block Company--"Robertson's
Raiders," for short--in the Scoggin Twilight League. He was
close to forty, old for baseball--though this was wartime
and even the major league rosters included players nearly as
old as Frank Barraclough--and shortstop was no longer his
position. He was in left field that year, batted sixth in
the lineup, and had already told the sports editor of the
Scoggin Tribune that he was giving up baseball at the end of
the season. "I don't see the ball like I want," he was
quoted as saying. "It looks kind of fuzzy to me around home
plate." But he was still a popular player in the league; he
had a strong arm, so opposing baserunners were cautious on
fly balls hit to left, and though he struck out more often
than not, when he connected he had more than his share of
home runs--big, booming drives that had been known to clear
the Johnson's Chevrolet scoreboard in dead center field, 415
feet away.

#

It was the middle of the afternoon, the Tuesday after Labor
Day--the first day of the new school year--when I stopped at
the Western Union office to see if there were telegrams to
deliver. There were two: the one for Frank Barraclough and
the other for Mr. Gowen, who owned a jewelry store on School
Street. I delivered the Gowen telegram first--it was from
his sister, telling him what time her train from Boston was
arriving in North Berwick the next day--because I knew what
the Barraclough message was. I wanted to postpone as long
as I could--which turned out to be a mistake, because
postponing gave me a lot of time to think about Jimmy being
dead.

It was the first time I had confronted the death of
someone close to me. A couple of years earlier Billy Roy
had been crushed and killed by a freight elevator at the
mill. I knew who Billy was, and I went to his funeral, but
only because he was the older brother of René Roy, a
classmate of mine. Jimmy was different: he had been a
friend, and his dying raised a multitude of questions. How
had he died? was one of them. And was there a body, or had
he gone down to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean with his
ship, never to be brought home, like the men on the Arizona?
If there was a body, and the Navy sent it to Jimmy's father,
would there be a church funeral, and would the casket be
open for all of us to look at Jimmy's corpse, and would I be
able to bear to see it? I wondered too if Jimmy had done
anything heroic, as if heroism--earning a medal--would
justify the loss of his life. By the time I got to the
Miller house on Kilby Street, I was crying; I had to wipe
the tears off my cheeks with the back of my hand before I
rang the doorbell.

It was nearly five o'clock, and when Frank Barraclough
came to the door he was already wearing his Twilight League
uniform--pale gray and pinstriped, with the words "Ready-
Mix" across the front of the blouse in dark red script.

"Telegram," I said. My voice cracked on the word. I
held out the yellow envelope with its glassine window, and
Jimmy's father took it from me.

"Thanks, kid," he said. "Sit tight for a second and
I'll get you something."

I never knew what he planned to give me for a tip, a
dime or a quarter or what. As he moved down the hall away
from me--number 3, the same as Jimmy Foxx's, on the back of
his jersey--he was opening the envelope, and right away he
saw what the telegram said. I heard him curse, saw him
stumble and put out his left hand to steady himself against
the nearest wall.

"You'd better scram, kid." He said the words hoarsely,
but not unkindly. He didn't turn around to look at me--
didn't let me see his face--and I scrammed.

#

Until Jimmy's death I had thought of myself as the caretaker
of his paper route, working and profiting from it only until
his return from the battlefields of World War Two. Now that
it was truly an inheritance, I began to feel the full weight
of the responsibility the route carried with it, and I began
to see some of the work I ought to do if I was to make it
mine.

For one thing, I decided I should enlarge the route,
add new customers, treat it as a living, growing enterprise.
Jimmy had left me with eighty-six customers, and I still had
the same eighty-six. Now, on weekends, I knocked on the
doors of people I didn't already deliver to, selling them on
the idea that--especially with a war on--they needed the
day's news brought to them regularly and on time. I even
called at the Lemieux Funeral Home, never mind my timidness
at banging the brass knocker and following old Mr. Lemieux
along a carpeted hallway past something called a Slumber
Room, where a pale gray-haired woman--a dead woman--lay face
up in a casket of glossy dark wood. It was my second view
of a corpse, but this one was a stranger; the sight didn't
bother me, and in any case it was incidental to my signing
up Mr. Lemieux. Within the month I had ninety-nine
customers.

My second decision was purely financial. That first
Friday after I'd delivered the telegram to Frank Barraclough
I told Mrs. Ouellette she would have to begin paying me each
week, or I would stop delivering her paper. I said I was
sorry, but circumstances had changed. I told her about
Jimmy being killed in action in the Pacific.

"I don't believe it," she said. Her expression didn't
change; she simply looked straight at me, her blue gaze
solemn and unblinking, her white hands working at the belt
of the pink housecoat, and waited for me to unsay what I had
just told her.

"It's true," I said. As it happened, the Evening
Express I held in my hands contained the story--and his
picture--of Jimmy Barraclough's death. I opened the paper
to his obituary and held it out to her.

She didn't look at it. She struck the paper down with
her right hand, tearing the page almost in half, and ran out
of the kitchen.

I sat down in one of the kitchen chairs and waited for
her to return. One of the Ouellette kids was on the floor
in front of the stove, nose running and mouth open, looking
as startled as I felt, and then he started to cry. I didn't
know what to do. When Mrs. Ouellette stood up to leave the
room, the front of the housecoat had parted and I'd been
able to see she wasn't wearing anything underneath--her skin
was creamy white and I could see the swell where she carried
the new baby, and the hair, like cornsilk, where her thighs
came together. I was dizzy with ignorance; I had scarcely
any notion of what was happening here, except I knew I had
witnessed something I had no right to see.

I was sitting, confused, trying to refold the torn
newspaper, when she came back into the kitchen. The child
went quiet when she appeared. Mrs. Ouellette was calm;
there was no sign of agitation on her face; it didn't look
as if she'd been crying. The pink housecoat was closed and
the belt tied. She took the newspaper out of my hands and
held it against her chest.

"I'm awfully sorry," she said, "but my check is late
again."

"Well--" I said. I had no idea what I was going to say
to her.

"I know you want to be a good businessman," she said,
"but I wonder if you could give me a few days grace. Just
till Monday. Just this one last time."

#

It was an eventful month, that September of 1942.
It was the month when my father was offered--and
accepted--a permanent job at Scoggin High School, teaching
history and civics, which meant that he was able to stop
keeping the books for Tony Apollonio's fruit store. His
change of fortune pleased my mother, who was forever wary of
anyone who spoke English with an accent--not only the Greek
Apollonios, but the town's large, blue-collar French-
Canadian population and, finally, the Edelsteins, an elderly
Jewish couple who lived across the street from us.

It was the month I left Edison School and moved up to
seventh grade at Emerson. The change from grammar school to
junior high was important to me; it enhanced my opinion of
myself, made me self-important in a way that Jimmy
Barraclough might have appreciated, even if he couldn't have
expressed it.

It was the month of Jimmy's funeral, a simple ceremony
that took place in the Congregational Church on Main Street
without the dead sailor's presence. His ship, a destroyer,
had gone down in the Coral Sea with few survivors, so there
was no body, no casket, no object to be mourned. Two
strangers, uniformed naval officers with white caps tucked
under their arms and white uniforms that carried cords and
stripes and jewelries of gold and silver, sat in a front pew
while the minister praised Jimmy and "this young man's
impatient desire" to die for his country. Frank Barraclough
sat in another front pew, far from the officers, and
listened to this praise with his head lowered; he looked
like a stranger--in street clothes, with no name or number
on his blue suitcoat--and I noticed the gray of his
sideburns and the bald spot forming at the crown of his
head. I had thought perhaps here was an occasion at which I
would see Jimmy's mother for the first time, but she seemed
not to be in the church. The one woman who was at the
service was Mrs. Ouellette; it was the first and last time I
ever saw her dressed up.

And it was the month, September of 1942, that I lost
her as a customer.

#

I know now that there's a lot of paraphernalia associated
with death, especially death of an unnatural sort.
Ambulances and doctors, police with their cars and their
blatting radios, ordinary cars that belong to curious
neighbors and other gawkers, and people--lots of people
standing around in groups of two and three, talking in
subdued voices, watching every movement around the scene of
the dying.

A couple of days after Jimmy's funeral, that was what I
saw when I arrived at Mrs. Ouellette's. The street was a
chaos, with cars parked every which way and uniformed
policemen--state troopers as well as locals--trying to get
the curious to go on about their business. Red and white
lights were flashing from the tops of the cars and the one
ambulance parked nearest the porch steps. The door to Mrs.
Ouellette's flat was open; I could see people moving around
inside, in her kitchen, but I couldn't get close enough to
see what they were doing. One of the front windows was
broken out, and shards of glass were spilled all over the
porch. Up on the third floor some stupid little brat was
hanging over the railing, trying to look down, and his
mother was hauling him back by his belt before he fell.

While I was watching, one of the ambulance men came out
of the flat carrying something wrapped in a brown blanket.
He put it inside the back of the ambulance; then he went
into the kitchen again and came out with a second blanket
that also went into the ambulance. Finally he and his
partner carried a blanket between them and loaded it after
the others. Then they got into the cab of the ambulance and
drove away, the siren making slow, soft whirring noises to
warn people to move. There was no way I could get close
enough to deliver Mrs. Ouellette's paper, even if I'd wanted
to, so I decided to finish my route and come back later.

Nobody had told me Mrs. Ouellette was dead, but I knew
she was, and so were her two poor little dirty kids--they
were all under those blankets loaded into the ambulance. I
didn't know why or how; I think I knew it had something to
do with Jimmy Barraclough being killed in action in the
Pacific, but I couldn't have explained the connection if
you'd asked me at the time. All I was really sure of was
that it was a shame, this business of dying for something
that had no size or weight or shape: for democracy, if
that's what Jimmy died for; for love, if that was Mrs.
Ouellette's reason--which is what Doc Ross was saying when I
got back to the tenement.

"Some people are too young to die for love," I heard
him say. He didn't know I was there in the kitchen, and the
man with him, the Scoggin chief of police--I recognized him
from the picture on fliers he'd passed around for the coming
election--raised one eyebrow and gave a slight nod in my
direction. Doc Ross was our family doctor--J. Watson Ross
was the name on his office door, but nobody ever called him
anything but Doc--and when he made house calls he carried a
small black valise filled with pills, wooden spatulas and
gauze bandages, a rubber hammer and his stethoscope. "Pink
pills for pale people," he would say when he opened a vial
and poured a few of its pills into a tiny white envelope.

Now he turned to look at me. Everyone else was gone;
the ambulance men, the police directing traffic, the
lookers-on--they'd all vanished. It was just the three of
us in Mrs. Ouellette's dingy kitchen, the kerosene heater
throwing orange shadows against the walls in the corner
where it stood, the door of the gas oven wide open. There
was more glass on the linoleum inside the door, a dirty
white towel tossed under the table; the lace curtains
stirred in the breeze that blew in through the broken
window.

"What are you doing here, boy?" Doctor Ross said.

"She was my customer," I said.

"Customer?" He took a step toward me, squinting at me
in the half-light of the room. "What kind of customer?"

"On my paper route."

I think he recognized me then, for he smiled, and then
he laughed--a short bark of a laugh. "Better she yours," he
said, "than you hers."

"Yes, sir," I said, though his words had made no sense
to me.

"What do you know about this business?" the police
chief asked me.

"Nothing, sir."

"Nothing?"

I hesitated. "Is she dead?" I said. "Are they all
dead?"

"All three," the chief said. "And the one she was
carrying."

Doc Ross put out one hand as if to stop the chief of
police from talking. "Do you know who the man is that made
her pregnant?" he asked me.

"No, sir."

"No idea at all?"

"No, sir," I said. "No idea."

He gave me a long look, then shrugged and straightened
up and put his hands in the pockets of his suitcoat. "I
don't guess there's anything else to be done here," he said
to the chief.

"Guess not," the chief said. He bent down to turn out
the kerosene flame, went over to the gas stove and checked
all the knobs to be sure they were off, closed the oven
door, carefully, so it didn't bang shut. "You'd better
skedaddle," he said to me. "Your folks'll be waiting
supper."

#

I tried to tell my parents what I had seen--the deaths, the
broken glass, the police and Doc Ross--but my mother stole
my thunder.

"I was on the switchboard when the calls started
coming," she said. "It was about three o'clock. First it
was Mr. Wiggin, from the flat just above Mrs. Ouellette,
calling for an ambulance. He was the one who broke all the
glass. First he had to smash the windowpane in the kitchen
door, so he could reach in and turn the lock. Then when he
got inside the kitchen the gas smell was so strong he had to
use a chair to break out the window."

"He could have just opened the window," my father said.
The evening paper was folded lengthwise beside his plate;
he'd seemed so interested in it, I was surprised he'd been
listening to my mother.

"He was in a hurry," she said. "I imagine he really
thought that if he could let in fresh air--if he could do it
soon enough--he could save the poor woman's life."

My father shrugged without looking up.

"Then it was Todd Emery, at the fire station, calling
Doctor Ross," my mother went on, "and then, later on, it was
the doctor calling from the flat. He wanted police to come,
to make people move out of the street. 'Get these damned
ghouls out of my hair,' I heard him say."

"What's a ghoul?" I wanted to know.

"Somebody who enjoys the company of dead people," my
father said. "Are you enjoying this?" he asked my mother.

"There was a dirty towel on the kitchen floor," I said.

"It was against the door. She didn't want any of the
gas to leak away," my mother said. "She wanted it all for
herself--and for her little ones." Her voice trailed off; I
thought she was going to cry.

"Dot," my father said--my mother's Christian name was
Dorothy--and I knew my father had pronounced it that way as
a warning, though the tone of his voice was as gentle as it
was firm.

My mother stood up as if she were about to clear away
the supper dishes, but for a moment she paused behind my
chair, her hands resting lightly on my shoulders. "How
terrible," she said, "to be poor and all alone."

My father opened the paper and gave her a sharp look
above its pages. "That's enough," he said.

I understood why my mother was excited by her inside
information about the deaths of Mrs. Ouellette and the
children, and in some imperfect way I understood how her
intimacy with the facts could upset my father, for whom
history needed to be distanced--reported in the papers--
before it was worth his attention.

But I didn't get to tell what happened just after the
police chief told me not to keep my mother and father
waiting supper for me--how I already had my left foot on the
bike pedal, about to swing myself up to the seat and ride
home, when Doc Ross called my name.

"Stevie," he said. "Just a minute." He came down the
steps toward me. "She owe you money?"

"Yes, sir."

"How much?"

"Three weeks," I said.

"How much is that?"

"Ninety cents."

He took a dollar bill out of his wallet and gave it to
me. "Keep the change," he said.

"Yes, sir. Thank you."

He looked up at the police chief, who was just locking
the door to the dead woman's flat. "Now she's square with
the world," he said.
________________________________________
From 'The Book of Lost Fathers' (Johns Hopkins)
Copyright 2000 by Robley Wilson