Gods Men (25 page)

He read the letter carefully and considered it a sensible one and read it again. She remembered Peking, too, did she? He felt excited, not because she was a girl but because she, like him, had been born in another world which nobody here knew anything about. He had learned now to live in America, but there would always be the world for him as well, and other people. He could not talk about it to Americans. They did not want to know about it. The people here were satisfied not to know about anything except what happened in their own streets.

He sat musing until he heard the tinkle of the bell that announced a customer, and then he went back into the grocery store. He would answer the letter, maybe on Sunday when he had sent Bump off to Sunday School.

Thus two weeks later, on a Thursday morning, Henrietta received the letter for which she had waited and for which she had gone herself every morning to open the door for the postman. The moment she saw it she took it and thrust it into the bosom of her apron. That day she was cleaning the attic for her grandmother, a musty place, hot under the roof and filled with dead belongings. There she returned to read Clem's letter.

Dear Henrietta,

It was a surprise of course but I had rather maybe have a letter from you than from William. I am older than you but I know I cannot go to college on account of earning my living. I am an orphan and I have an orphan also to support. I do not even know his whole name, Bump he is called but I am sure it is not his name. He says when he was little he was thought bumptious and so people began to call him that. He cannot remember any family and so was an Aid child. I don't know why I tell you about him. Some day I will tell you how I got him.

I am a poor letter writer not having much time but I would like you to know that I do remember Peking. It would be nice to talk with you about it as nobody here knows anything about it over there. Who knows, sometime maybe I could come to see you though not until I get Bump educated. I have a great many ideas of what I want to do when that job is done when I can think of myself and my own life.

I would enjoy hearing from you again. Yours sincerely,

Clem Miller.

Thus began the passage of letters between a small town in Ohio and a suburb of New York. Without seeing each other for two more years, boy and girl wove between them a common web of dreams. So profound was their need to dream that neither spent the time to tell the other the bare facts of their lives; Henrietta that she had graduated from the big bare public high school almost friendless because the other girls thought her too proud to join their chatter of boys and dances, and Clem that he was grinding out his youth behind a counter in a country store. These things neither considered important They were both weaving together the fabric of the past to make the fabric of the future. It was years before Henrietta learned all the simple facts of Clem's life.

These were the facts. He had turned back that day to see Bump padding through the dust after him. That night they had slept in a barn, taking care not to rouse the farmer and his family, and from it they had set forth again in the early morning.

“Reckon the Aid will chase us?” Bump asked in the course of the next day.

“I don't think she'll care what becomes of us,” Clem replied.

The sky was bright above their heads. On that day he began to have his first intimations of his own country. He had walked for endless miles across the Chinese land with an old woman he did not know, linking village to village with his lonely footsteps. Now he walked as many miles with a child who was a stranger to him, across a landscape strange to him, too. Here there were few villages and the farmhouses stood separate and solitary. He avoided them unless he needed food, and then he went to knock upon a kitchen door to ask for work. He was stiff with softhearted farm wives who wanted to give them a meal and he demanded that he be allowed to pay for what he got, and he was equally harsh with surly men who declared there was nothing for him to do. Work there must be, he told them, because they must have food.

How many days he walked in that bright autumn he did not count or care. Slowly he learned to love the look of this land, even its uncultivated spaces, its ragged roadsides, its sparsely settled miles. He learned to be wary of old tramps and to choose the back roads they avoided. In the back roads and the remote farmhouses the people he found were good. They were not gregarious, these countrymen of his. They did not live in big families as the Chinese did. Two generations in a house were enough and maybe too much. More often a man and woman and their children were alone under a roof. The children were usually towheaded and their faces were burned brown with the wind and sun, and because he was a stranger they ran when they saw him just as the Chinese children had done. He thought of these dwellers on the land as folk half wild and scarcely civilized and yet he kept among them.

“Ain't we goin' to settle down somewheres?” Bump asked, as the days went on.

“Some time soon. You have to get to school,” Clem said.

“Do I have to go to school?” Bump wailed.

“Surely you do,” Clem said sternly.

One day at last they came into a town he liked, though it looked no different from any other. But it was in Ohio, a state that he had come to enjoy in the past days, a place where the people were decent and Bible reading. They made him think of his own Bible-reading parents, mingling kindness with rigid goodness. The streets in the town were clean and there was. a schoolhouse of wood frame painted white. The church, the post office, and the general store stood around a green square, in the midst of which was a rough statue of Abraham Lincoln. These were the reasons Clem chose New Point, and he went first to the store. Inside he found the tall lean man who hired him, after some hesitation, and then let him rent a room upstairs as part of his weekly wage. Clem bought Bump a suit of clothes and a pair of shoes and two pairs of socks on credit, and started him to school the next Monday.

At the end of that Monday he had given Bump his first and only whipping. The boy had come back from school gloomy and had gone upstairs quietly. Clem was busy with a customer and as soon as he was free he hastened up the stairs behind the store. There he found the boy packing his clothes into a flour sack.

“What are you doing?” Clem demanded.

Bump scowled at him from under sunburned brows. “I ain't stayin' with you,” he said in a flat voice.

“Why not?” Clem asked.

“I ain't goin' to no school.”

Clem glared at the boy who had become his whole family. “Why not?” he asked again.

“I don't like it.”

Rage filled Clem's soul. Not to like to go to school, not to take the chance that was offered, not to accept the gift of sacrifice, seemed to him ingratitude so immense that earth could not hold it nor heaven allow it. He rushed at Bump and seized him by the seat of his trousers and swung him clear of the floor. He flung him down flat and knelt beside him and beat him with his open hands until the boy howled. Upon this scene Mr. Janison hastened up the stairs.

“Lay off!” he bellowed. “You want to kill that boy?”

Clem turned upon him a face set and white. “He's going to take his chance if I do have to kill him,” he replied and finished his punishment. When he let Bump get up he pointed at the flour sack and waited until the weeping boy had unpacked it and put his clothes away again.

Janison waited, too, a quizzical look behind his mustaches. Then Clem turned solemnly to his employer. “I aim to bring this boy up like my own brother. That means he's going to get a good education, the kind I'd give my eyes to have, nearly. He's to be a man, not some worthless son-of-a-gun.”

Mr. Janison pulled his goatee. “Go to it,” he said. “That was as pretty a lickin' as ever I see.”

He went downstairs again and Clem sat down on the bed. “Bump, I hope never to lick you again,” he said gravely. “I don't believe in it and I don't feel I ought to have to do it. But if you dare to run away and throw out a fine chance like I'm offering you, I will come after you and lick you wherever you are. You hear me?”

“Ye-es,” Bump sobbed.

“Well, then,” Clem did not know how to go on. “You come downstairs and I'll get you some crackers and cheese—and some lickerish,” he said finally. Food, he thought, was what the boy needed, and something sweet, maybe.

During the next years, as Bump began to grow into a satisfactory boy, Clem wondered often about his beginnings. That he was a child without parents, Clem knew; without parents, that is, except in the simplest animal sense. Mom Berger had told him one night after the younger children were in bed, that they were all love children, “except that there Bump.”

“What is he?” Clem had asked.

“I dunno what you'd call him,” she had said mysteriously.

With an embarrassment which sat ridiculously upon her thick person, she had pursed her lips and remained silent. Pop Berger had taken up the sordid story.

“That there Bump,” he said after some moments of rumination and chewing upon a vast quid of tobacco. “He's what you might call a rape child.”

Clem had flushed. “You mean—”

“Yeah,” Pop Berger had said slowly, relishing the evil news. “His paw attacked a girl on the streets of Philly. 'Twas all in the papers.”

“Yeah,” Mom Berger said from beside the stove. “And I ast you was it real rape. A woman don't rape easy or if she do, it ain't rape.”

Pop took the story away from her again. “Anyways, it was brought up in court for to be rape, and the raper, that was Bump's paw, mind you, he had to pay the girl a hunnerd dollars.”

“Some women makes their livin' one way and some another,” Mom Berger had said, and had clattered a stove lid to let Pop know that enough was enough.

If the story was true, Clem had told himself in reflecting pity, then Bump had no parents at all, neither father nor mother. By the accident of two conflicting bodies he had been conceived, his soul snared somewhere among the stars. He was not orphaned, for even an orphan had once possessed parents. The boy's solitary creation moved all that was fatherly in Clem's being, and it was most of him.

He had not been alone in what he did either for Bump or himself. With the affection so easily found in any small American town, the citizens observed the solitary and ambitious boy. They knew no more about him than that he was an orphan and they took it for granted that Bump was his brother. That he had run away from an eastern state endeared him to them. Mr. Janison soon began to spread news of Clem's monstrous good qualities. His industry was astounding to the employer. When other young males of the town were crazed with spring and the baseball season, Clem continued behind his counter, even staying to sweep the store as usual when the day was over. His belated arrival on the baseball field and the frenzy of those who awaited him only made him more beloved. For all his medium stature, Clem had long strong arms that could perform wheels in the air and send a ball faster than imagination. “A good all-round feller,” New Point decided, “a feller that'll make his way.”

Two persons kept to themselves their thoughts about Clem. Miss Mira Bean, Bump's teacher to whom Clem had gone after the whipping, knew that Clem was more than New Point discerned. She knew it the first evening he had come to her door, clean and brushed and holding his cap in his hand.

“Come in,” she had said with her usual sharp manner to the young.

Clem had come into her small two-room flat.

“My name is Clem Miller.”

“Sit down,” she commanded.

The rooms were small and crowded with furniture and books. There was little space to sit, and he took the end of a haircloth sofa. Miss Bean was like any of the middle-aged women he saw upon the streets of New Point, a lean, sand-colored shape, washed and clean, straight-haired and gray-eyed.

“What do you want, Clem?” she asked.

“I want to talk to you about Bump,” he said. He had gone on then to tell why he had felt compelled to whip the boy.

“But I can't whip him again,” he said. “You, Miss Bean, have got to make him like school well enough so he will want to get an education.”

“He's got to stay in school, whether he likes it or not,” Miss Bean said somewhat harshly. “It's the law.”

Clem had sat looking at her. “I don't think you ought to take advantage of that,” he said. “The law is on your side, of course. But even the law can't make a boy get an education. It can only make him sit so many hours a day where you are. He's got to like it before he can get educated.”

Miss Bean was not a stupid woman and she was struck with this wisdom in a youth who was still too young to be called a man.

“You're right about that,” she said after a moment.

She had done her best, not only for Bump, but also for Clem, lending him books, guiding his reading, letting him talk to her for hours on Sundays. For though Clem made Bump go to Sunday School and lectured him about the value of going to church, he himself never went.

“Whyn't you go, then, if it's so good?” Bump grumbled.

Clem, polishing Bump's ragged school shoes, paused to answer this as honestly as he could. “I just can't get myself to it,” he confessed. “What's more, I can't tell you why. Something happened to me once somewhere.”

“What was it?” Bump asked.

Clem shook his head. “It would take me too long to tell you.”

He never told anyone anything about himself. It would indeed have taken him too long. Where would he begin, and how would he explain his origins? How could he ever tell anyone in this peaceful town in Ohio that he had once lived in Peking, China, and that he had seen his parents killed? There were things too endless to tell. Only to Henrietta was he one day to speak, because she knew at least the beginning.

The church bell came to his aid. “You run along,” he told Bump briskly. The shoes were polished and he washed his hands in the china bowl. Then he fixed Bump's tie to exactitude and parted his hair again and brushed it. “Mind you learn the golden text,” he said sternly.