Bomb Scare

by Hunter James

Sometimes iit seemed to him that the war had been going on for even longer than he could remember. It had sure brought big changes into his life—no more long visits to the Virginia coast, where his mother's parents lived, not even those familiar Sunday visits to his other grandparents' house out in the country, no Hershey bars after lunch at school, no decent cigarettes anymore, no more family reunions.

Was it really all over, as the papers were saying? If not, almost surely it would be soon, now that the United States was dropping those crazy new bombs all over the late great Empire of Japan.

Maybe that's why Ryerson Goode was feeling more than a little excited and generous when he went downtown to take in a Thursday afternoon double-feature at the "Crumb," a real treat that had always been saved for Saturdays during the war years. Everything would be different now: Milky Ways and Butterfingers and Three Musketeers every day after lunch at school rather than on those rare occasions when he had to stand in a line that stretched all the way out to the playground just to get his hands on one. The same with all the other good things of life.

"Only one, Ryerson," the teacher at the end of the line would say. "We've got to make sure we have enough to go around. Our boys overseas come first, you know."

That's the way it had been at school all through the war years, but it was summer now and there was no school and the war in Europe was over and soon there would be no more fighting in the Pacific. Would Lucky Strike Green come safely back from the war? Well, he never much cared for them anyway. He was only twelve and smoked very little, but for his money the "whites" were far superior.

He left his father's barbershop and walked out into the new freedom of the late morning sunshine. Maybe he would celebrate by taking in a Wild Bill Elliott double feature at the old State Theater. The theater had once been a vaudeville house, the only such place in town. He wondered what it was like, in those old glory days of vaudeville, as he bought his ticket and stopped just inside to see if he had enough for popcorn and an R. C.

Yes—and with a whole dime left over!

He still felt a strange sense of excitement as he entered the dark of the auditorium, fingering his dime. Things would be different now. No more talk of Depression and war. Just as he started to take a seat he heard a voice behind him: "Hey, buddy whatcha gonna do with that thar dime?"

Ryerson looked at it. He hadn't decided yet. He looked at the newcomer, a boy of fifteen or sixteen—three, maybe four years older than he was, barefooted and wearing coveralls.

"Dunno," he said, taking his seat.

"Say, why don'tcha lend me that dime. C'mon. I'll be sure 'en git it back before the show is over?"

"First show?"

"Yeah. The first. Jes need to borrow it fer a minute or so."

Two other newcomers had appeared behind the first. Ryerson clung to the dime; it had got a little sweaty in his palm. How could he trust a guy he had never even seen? Well, he knew, deep down, that he couldn't trust him at all, and ordinarily he would never have let him have the dime, even if he'd had to call on the management to intervene—even if it had meant he would have to stand up and fight the guy.

Somehow today was different. He looked at the coin and handed it over. "Sure gotta have it back after the first show."

The three were already halfway out of the auditorium. "Sure, we'll have it back. You'll see. Honest to God."

Only a ten cent piece. Yet it could have meant another box of popcorn and cold drink for the second feature. The moment it left his hand he felt a great emptiness come over him.

"You're just like papa," his mother was always telling him. "Giving your last cent away if you think somebody needs it worse than you. There's such a thing as being much too generous, you know."

Maybe he would be lucky; maybe they really would bring it back. Only on such a day would he have allowed for so much honesty and character in a bunch of snotty nosed barefoots. Yet for them not to come back—well, he could scarcely imagine anything quite so dishonest. He felt that the world had changed somehow. That everything would be different. He had just felt full of a spirit of generosity. He kept thinking about what his mother had said: how unselfish he was.

Why, then, had he felt the loss—if loss it was to be—so acutely?

"Certainly a very good man in many ways," his mother had so often said of her father, "but he would let his own family go hungry before he would deny the sorriest, good-for-nothing beggar his last cent."

Only a ten-cent piece. Unselfish. An excellent trait in man. Something to cling to even he could no longer cling to the dime. All through the showing of the first feature he forced himself not to look around to see if the freeloader was on his way back with the coin, wanting to believe in spite of everything that he would come up and stick it in his hand at any moment.

He had already sat through the “Movietone News” and the first “Merrie Melodies” cartoon without looking around.

He had sat through “The Three Stooges” and the second cartoon. He sat through “Steama, The Jungle Woman,” the next-to-last episode in the weekly serial, never taking his eyes off the screen even though he had begun to feel all empty again and maybe even a little dead inside.

He even sat through half of the second Wild Bill feature, Mystery at Big Pond, before allowing himself to become really downright concerned about his loss.

From that moment he was constantly craning his neck to see if there was any sign of the borrowers. Nothing. A couple of times, when there was a lag in the action on the screen, he even walked out into the vestibule to see if they had come back.

He looked all the way up Liberty toward the courthouse square and then down the other way toward the tobacco warehouses and hardware shops. He went back inside and watched impatiently as Wild Bill Elliot roared into Big Pond and shot up the place like crazy and then discovered what Ryerson had guessed even before he had gone out to reconnoiter North Liberty Street: that the manager of the Wells Fargo line was the brains behind a robber gang that had been holding up his own stagecoaches.

It made him a little sick to think that he hadn't had the courage to stand up for himself the way Wild Bill would have.

"No damn you, No! You ain't getting this dime! I've done told you now!"

That's what he should have said to the guy and his two companions, but he'd never been the victim of so brazen a theft; and it was really a whole new experience to think that people who would do such a thing were out walking the streets like free men.

Maybe he was just a coward. He had never backed off from a fight at school even though he hated it when he had to stand there and face the class tough with most of the other toughs ganged up behind his opponent. He had never backed down no matter how many times he had felt like it. Perhaps he should have fought to hold on to the coin, the way the marines had fought to take back all those islands in the Pacific. That was what made him go all sick inside: that he hadn't been man enough to hold his ground.

-*-

He sat through a second run of “The Three Stooges” and the Movietone newscast, with all its talk about the victory celebrations in Europe, craning his neck all the while in the lost hope that the dirty little guy might have remembered to come back at last. He was halfway through a second run of original feature film when he finally had to make himself face the grim reality that he would never seen the dime again. It was getting late and he knew that it would soon be closing time at the barbershop and that his father would be anxious to get home and tend to his Victory Garden, even if he didn't have to call it that anymore.

Only a ten-cent piece. Still, a lot of money just to give away, as hard as times had been these last few years, and the whole idea that he would allow something like that to happen had thrown him into a terrible mood—not so much the loss of the dime as his own loss of innocence—during what otherwise should have been a fine afternoon, because the newsboys were all out on the street hawking the evening paper: TRUMAN SEES PEACE SOON!

Was it possible that the guy in the faded, dirty jeans had only forgot? He had started up the hill for the two-block walk back to the barbershop when he thought, no, not yet, not quite yet, because he realized he had not done all he could to retrieve his lost fortune. Maybe he could still find the guy out on the street somewhere.

He took a long slow walk up around the courthouse and looked inside of O'Hanlon's Drugstore and then stood out on the curb thinking of all the times the guys at school had tried to start fights with him because they didn't like the color of his hair or because his shoes were always a bit too shiny or his shirts too starched and how he'd had to play the lead role in a third-grade play and make a speech about cleanliness and good health and right living while leading a tug of war against the forces of dirt and evil.

All the guys he'd had to face on the school-ground were on the other side, and he knew there would probably be more fights because he'd had to stand up there on the stage and lecture them about their dirty teeth and their dirty fingernails and their overall lack of good hygiene.

It had turned out exactly as he expected: one of the leaders of the other team had wanted to start something at lunch recess. That was all right. He had been through it all before, and with the help of his father had learned how to take care of himself. So that it hadn't actually come to a fight, because everybody else in class knew about him now; they knew he wouldn't back down just because he was outnumbered and that he couldn't be bluffed as easily as they had once thought. He knew it would be the same thing all over again, and that it would almost surely come to a fight this time, if he were ever to catch up with the dirty little two-timing grunt who had stolen his last ten-cent-piece.

-*-

He found his father stretched out half asleep in his barber-chair with a copy of the afternoon Sentinel spread out on his lap.

Truman Tells Japan to Quit or Be Destroyed

His father and only two of his other five barbers were in the shop. It had been a slow afternoon.

"Well, son," his father said, hitting the lever of the chair and bringing himself to a sitting position. "Looks as if we've about got this old war behind us now."

Should he tell his father how he had been suckered out of the dime? He would prefer to have him think he had spent it on popcorn. He had been forced to learn a lot at school, just to defend himself, but he still felt like a simpleton in a lot of ways. Is that what his father would think? Something way down inside him needed to know, but he also knew it would be awfully hard to think up the right words to explain how three guys he had never seen before had made a plumb bodacious fool out of him.

"Funny thing, though," his father said, looking at the paper again. "The Japs, they say they've got the bomb too." He looked around at the other barbers. "Reckon it's true? Could mean real trouble if it is. A lot of our own cities getting blown up."

"Naw," said one of the others. "They ain't got no bomb. They gotta say that, I guess, but you know they woulda used it a long time before now if they’d really had it."

"Well, listen to this," his father said, quoting from the paper. "'The Japanese radio in Singapore in a broadcast monitored by BBC said today that Japan has a weapon "similar" to the atomic bomb and will use it "to the utmost against the United States.'"

"Well, I don't know, Prather. I sure do hope it ain't true. Those dirty little Japs they've sure put us through enough hell already."

"Does it mean more war?" Ryerson asked his father. He thought of all those Milky Ways and Three Musketeers and Butterfingers and Mars Bars flying right out of the lunchroom at school and all the hard times coming again if there was to be more fighting in the Pacific.

"Well," one of the other barbers said. "I just don't believe they've got the bomb. Sure hope not."

"You really think there will be more war?" Ryerson asked.

"Dunno, son. Just dunno. Almost time for Gabriel Heatter. We'll tune him in and see what he has to say about it." His father laid the paper aside, and Ryerson read the headlines again:

HIROSHIMA DISAPPEARS IN ATOMIC BOMB BLAST

Plane Crew Sees City

Go Up in Smoke Cloud

He wondered what it would be like to live again in a world where there were no gas-rationing stamps to think about and where the school cafeteria was full of chocolate bars and the store shelves packed with Lucky Strikes and Camels, and him always a dime short of what he might have had if he just hadn't let himself be played for a fool. A big loss, getting bigger all the time in his mind, bigger than the loss of all those candy bars, and yet he still couldn't bring himself to say anything about it to his father.

Gabriel Heatter came on and announced there were was "very good news in the world tonight" and dismissed as "mere talk and rumor" reports that the Japs also had the Bomb.

"Well, that's mighty good to hear," his father said. His voice sounded different somehow; because, well, you just about had to trust Gabriel Heatter. If not, then who? H.V. Kaltenborn? Fulton Lewis Jr.? No, Heatter was the man, by far the most reliable on the air to his father's way of thinking.

Then he felt those other old nagging doubts preying on him again, wondering how he could have been so stupid as to let a stranger have his last dime and was still able to bring home straight A's on his report card. That is, whenever it struck him as worthwhile to do so. He watched as his father stood up and placed the Sentinel on a stack of papers he was saving for future generations and said goodnight to the other two barbers, as they put on their jackets and went out. He put on his own jacket and was preparing to lock up when two men who had been shooting pool next door at the Trade Street Billiard Parlor came in.

"Well, Prather," one of the men said. "There's mighty good news in the world tonight."

His father cheered up a little when he saw the other men. Ryerson had seen both of them hanging around the shop at different times, but he knew only one of them by name. Garl Humphries. His father's best friend. They had come to Winston when both they and the town were young.

Garl was drunk now. "Good news in the world tonight!"

"Yep, Garl, that's what they're saying all right."

"How's about a little game of five-card, Prather?"

"Madam's waiting supper, boys."

"Just a couple hands. Hell. C'mon, Prather, it's not everyday that we get a chance to celebrate the end of a war."

-*-

Full dark now, and in the boy's sleep the voices in the rear of the barbershop seemed to come from somewhere off beyond the rim of the world. He jerked awake and heard them more plainly, the laughter and drunken howls and just plain loud talk of men enjoying themselves over a bottle of good bootleg whisky and a lively game of setback or poker.

Whatkind of world's it gonna be, Prather. What kind of world we gonna be living in now that this waris over?

Ryerson hit the big lever at the side of the barber-chair and brought it straight up. It was so dark he could not make out the time from the clock on the wall. He knew his mother would be waiting up with a lot to say, and it wouldn't have anything to do with the Bomb either. He knew they should have been home hours ago.

He wasn't even worried about the dime now, except that the thought of losing it was always there somewhere at the back of his mind: he was thinking mostly of what his mother would say when they got home.

Don't even stepfoot inside this door, drunkard!

Perhaps his father would phone and make up some kind of excuse. Not that it would help much, but surely even his mother would understand that the end of a big war like this didn't come every day.

He could not help thinking about the lateness of the hour and about how they would explain themselves when they got home the war is over mama don't you see the war is over we don't have to worry about anything now

Actually he knew there was nothing they might say that would help. It was supposed to be one of the greatest days in the history of the country, but it had sure turned rotten now. How could he have been so foolish as to give up his ten-cent piece without some guarantee in writing . . .

they say you should always have a contract any dumb fool knows you gotta have a contract

Should he at least have said something to the police? No. Then his parents would find out for sure because it would all be right there in the afternoon Sentinel, right alongside the latest news out of the Pacific.

BOY LOSES LIFE SAVINGS AS WORLD GOES UP IN SMOKE

He slept again, fitfully, and woke to see his father raking in another pot: shouts, drunken guffaws as the others slammed down their cards and conceded that his father was indeed the best five card stud player in the whole goddamn world.

"Yep, Prather, said one of the men. "You're the best. Ain't that right, boys?"

"Outa my class."

Again the bottle went around as they talked about how the good old U. S. had finally socked it to those stinking little Japs. The boy kept looking at the clock, now that his eyes had grown used to the dark. It looked to be about ten.

Ten o'clock!

They had never been that late getting home. As the long hand slowly moved past ten he felt the knot in his stomach draw a little tighter. He crawled out of the chair and went back to where the men were playing cards, standing in the door of the latticed wall, beneath a sign that said, "IT PAYS TO LOOK WELL."

"Yep, we showed 'em, Prather. We sho did."

How much longer could his father keep winning without losing back everything he had taken in? How long could he keep laughing? How much longer could he go without at least looking at his watch? A man named Ed Fortiscue had joined the game and was now dealing the cards. The man called Garl said by god he'd better get a better goddamn hand this time or he was gonna start thinking something was mighty goddamn suspicious goddammit.

The third man, whose name the boy did not know and who he had never seen before, had not joined in the raucous spirit of the occasion. He looked as the boy felt: as if he'd just lost every last cent he had in the world. Maybe he had, because Ryerson's father kept raking in all the pots.

He had lost all of his somber look now, maybe because of the liquor, maybe because he was the big winner, maybe only because he had finally decided it was good to have the war behind them now even if the U. S. did have to play a little dirty to win it. Only a dime. Yet it would have been enough for two more Hershey bars, or a Hershey and a large R. C. or Pepsi.

Pepsi Cola is the Drink for You Twice as much for a nickel too

Yet he would now have to swallow all of his indignity and try to get on with his life.

"This here is the last hand, boys. Me and the boy have gotta get on home. We ain't gonna have time to worry about no Japs if the madam gets on her high horse."

"Whatcha think about that bomb," Garl said as he dealt the last hand. "Ain't that a reg'lar blister?"

His father was suddenly somber again, not even looking at his cards. "It was something all right. But I ask you, boys. What kinda world's it gonna be now? What kinda world we gonna have now that we got this strange new weapon among us? Won't be long till the Russians have it, too. You can betcha last dollar on that."

"That ain't all," Ed Fortiscue said. "Think about how bad times were before the war. I sho don't wanta live in that kind of world again."

The thought that bad times might come again had brought a moment of sobriety to the whole table. Nobody was looking at his cards.

"Yeah," Prather said. "Don't wanta ever seen another year like Thirty-Three or Thirty four."

"Thirty three, thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six—they were all bad. I reckon that's why Roosevelt felt he had to get us in this war."

"I was in Texas in Thirty three," the man who had lost everything said. "Why you couldn't even convince those folks down there that there'd ever even been a Depression. Never felt it a-tall down there. Yep. That's Texas for you. All them oil wells and big derricks. You'd look at one of those folks and talk about how hard times were back up north and he's just look at you kinda funny like and say, 'Hard times? What the hell you talkin’ about, boy?’”

"Well, that sho is a blister," Garl said. "How about one more hand?"

Prather looked at his watch. "Well, I guess one more won't hurt. I'm sure gonna be in some kind of hot water when I get home, but I don't reckon she can heat it any hotter than it already is."

"I'm out," said the man who lost everything as he rose to put on his jacket. Garl dealt the cards. The boy watched that knowing grin come over his father's face; he knew he had the others beat again.

"Well, goddammit, that does it for me," Garl said, slamming his deck down. "Ain't no fuckin' justice in this world, I can tell you that."

He and Ed Fortiscue both rose to put on their coats. Ed took the last swallow of bourbon, which was only proper since it was his bottle anyway.

Ryerson's father didn't look as though he was going anywhere, not home, not back to work in the morning, not anywhere. He looked a little sad. He had called home to say there had been something wrong with the car, but Ryerson knew his voice would have given him away. Usually his mother could rely on her nose to scent out such evils. But she didn't even need it this time. Ryerson could hear her all the way from the other side of the line.

You bring that boy home drunkard and then you go where you please drunkard and after all my years of trying to make a decent home

"The war's over, honey. The war's over. Things are gonna be a lot better now. Let's try to think about how much better things are gonna be now that we dropped that bomb."

Ryerson couldn't hear what else his mother was saying. All he knew was that she would be in no mood to celebrate a war she'd always thought could have been avoided anyway. She always had a sneer in her voice when she talked about the President.

"That devil Roosevelt," she always called him, "sinister lover of Jews, liquor, loose women, a warmonger and infidel, a veritable dissembler" who had plotted for years to bring this tragic conflict on them. He had always thought his mother was the only Republican in North Carolina and had been careful not to talk it up around on the playground at school.

Ryerson kept wondering whether he could avoid getting hit by a stray shot of his mother's pistol if she was in a really bad mood. They went back down the narrow alley to where his father always parked the car; before he could get in it he fell—tumbled—onto the trunk, with that hacking cough the boy remembered from his earliest days. The cigarette his father always had in his mouth. The coughing fit had snared him with an almost demonic power, and he looked really tired before he was able to get in the car and light another Camel.

Ryerson had never seen him like that. He looked sick and old. Maybe because he knew there would be trouble when they got back to the house, perhaps the same as on that long ago night when he had come home from the ballpark drunk and stumbled into bed amid a shower of brooms and chairs and whatever else his mother could get her hands on.

-*-

That was the night she and Ryerson had packed their things and got in the car and drove over to Aunt Julia’s house in Buena Vista as a first stop on their way to a new life somewhere in the West.

"Forever," she had said. "Child, I can't live with this. We must go."

Go they would and go they did.. Once in the car, his mother had seemed undecided on exactly where they actually would go. It was then that she hit on the idea of driving first to Aunt Julia’s house to see what advice she could get from her sister and brother-in-law. She would at least get sympathy, and he knew his aunt and uncle would gladly put them up until they had decided on the new life they were to make for themselves. It was different when they got there; she had realized by then that she could not really bear to go inside and face her sister with the terrible stories of her husband's drunkenness.'

"Are we going in?" the boy asked.

She had begun to cry. "I don't know, son. I just don't know any more."

They sat there a while longer with the lights out; but he knew by now that his mother was not going in, that she just couldn't bring herself to humiliate herself before her younger sister.

Soon she backed the car out of the drive and turned toward home again. When they got there his father was in bed asleep, snoring away with the brooms and mops still lying on top of him. Ryerson realized that he and his mother had gone away and come back without his father knowing anything about it. He didn't even find out about it until weeks later.

Would it be like that again tonight? Perhaps it would be different if his mother could be made to understand that his father was really sick and, on top of that, worried about the new bomb and what it would mean if Russia ever got hold of it and whether any of them could survive in that kind of world.

His father never could get rid of that cough; one day perhaps it would kill him, and the boy knew now when he looked at him that he could never bring himself to confess he had lost his last dime to a dirty little thief at the movie house. After all they had been through during the Depression, just trying to keep food on the table, and his father always wasting money on drink —not all of it, though, because those were also the years that he had begun to buy up other barbershops and a string of rent-houses, maybe some of them with the big stakes he'd always been able to win at the gambling table.

By the time the war came there was plenty of food on the table and a good bit of money in the bank. They would never really know hard times again, but somehow his mother was unable to keep all that straight in her head.

"You think the Japs really have the bomb?" Ryerson asked him for the third or fourth time.

"Naw," his father said with new assurance. After all, Gabriel Heatter had spoken just about the last word on the subject. "Naw, they ain't got the bomb. Yet you hardly know what to think about it all. All we can know for sure is that the world we knew before this terrible war—bad as it was in some ways—is a world we're never gonna know again."

There was something new in his father's voice. He had never seen quite the same worried look on his face. Yet the hard times were over now—or were there more to come? Was he about to lose one of his barber shops or some of his other property? He had lost his first shop during the early days of the Depression before swearing that he would never let that happen to him again.

His father didn’t seem to be thinking about home at all. He leaned on the fender of his 1939 Plymouth and looked up at the sky. "I just don't know, son. This new weapon they've got. Makes you think this old world ain't ever gonna be quite the same again. We got a whole new world now. Lots of folks, well, I guess they just don't see it yet, but it's gonna be a lot different from anything we've known before."

Maybe his father was right. Maybe he had foreseen something that so many others had not. Well, he could worry about all that later, and, besides, nothing had seemed quite as important to him after he had been gulled out of his last ten-cent piece. He was just glad his father hadn't asked about it. He knew he couldn't say anything about it tonight. Maybe tomorrow, when his father had got over all his worries about the new bomb and started thinking about what it would mean to have all the gas and sugar and candy bars and cigarettes that you could ever want. It would finally be like America again.

Then he knew he couldn't wait till tomorrow. It all just came out of him, the whole ignominious story, right there in the parking lot while his father stood looking up at the sky. The lost dime, his own stupidity in letting it go like that, his failure to demand a contract, his search for the two thieves.

"A dime? You worried about a little old dime. I know times have been hard, son, but we've never been so lacking that we've had to worry about the loss of a single little old dime. Sure, you gonna run into people, people who'll do you that way and steal every last thing you've got if they can get away with it. But it's just part of growing up son. You lost a dime today, and I won it back a hundred-fold tonight. A whole lot more than a hundred fold. Never had such luck at the gambling table. Best not to say anything about that to the madam, though."

-*-

"Peace," his mother said. "Peace, peace! Men cry peace when there is no peace!"

The boy stepped back in alarm. He could not see the gun, and now he knew she must not have it; for she came toward them with her arms flung wildly upward, like a prophet of old, her hair all tossed and crazy like the hair of all those drunken goddesses in his mythology books. Like a Cassandra doomed forever to know the truth and unable even to beg an audience to hear it. She was no longer as she had been just that morning, no longer the lovely young women people sometimes mistook for his older sister.

"Oh, yes, the war is over, and maybe we will even go back to our normal lives for a while, but peace? Ah, men are fools to call for peace! Ah, have we not known from of old that that devil usurper in the White House has only enhanced the tragedy that afflicts this world and that very soon now it will be the turn of all the powers of darkness!"

She had dropped her voice; now it rose again, her face twisted in a almost maniacal grimace, something he had never seen in her at all. Her voice kept rising as she again flung her arms toward the ceiling, looking upward as though seeing right through the house into some unknown world far above.

"Listen to me, son. Listen to me, all ye minions of evil and darkness! Never again will we know anything but death, turmoil, and tribulation in this old world! Why, son, why! Why do we cry peace when there can be no peace! Have I not said a thousand times that the war itself is only a prelude of greater evils to come? We can see it on every side. Look at the nigras. How uppity they act in all the stores, on the streets, in all the buses. We'll not be able to do a thing with them now that they are demanding their 'rights.' Why the whole country is practically in the hands of the communists at this very moment. And who brought all that damnable liquor back to our shelves, and turned our cities into cesspools of drunkenness and decay? Yes, yes! I say, the war may be over, but do not think that we will have peace. Have I not told you a thousand times, a thousand times more than a thousand, that this is merely the beginning of sorrows!"

"Sit down, honey. Sit down. You've been reading too many books again. Did you take the medicine I sent the shine-boy after today? Did he bring it to you like I asked him to. You were supposed to get started on it right away."

"Peace!" She spat out the word. "Bah, I tell you there will be no peace in this world, not for drunkards and liars and idolators, not even for those who would dupe us into thinking that there can ever be such a thing as peace!"

"Sit down, baby. You're a little excited, that's all. Everything will seem a lot different in the morning."

Ryerson watched his father, who stood, as always, with the stub of a Camel in his mouth. He still had that strange new look—completely different from anything Ryerson could remember. Ryerson had learned to expect trouble when his father was late, maybe a broom in the face, maybe even a wild shot from the pistol. Nothing like this. The boy had never seen anything like this at all.

"Sit down, honey. Sit down. This is no time for hysterics. War's over, baby. War's over. Let's be a little thankful while we can."

"That damnable heathen! Conspiring every way he knew how to get us into this war, to bring back liquor, to build up the nigra, and you call that 'saving the country.'"

"Don't know where we'd be now without Roosevelt and Truman," his father said. "Maybe living under Hitler and his goose-steppers. Don't blame them for the bomb. It did a lot of good. Saved a lot of lives. That's what the papers say. Everybody talking up the bomb. But you need to lie down and get some rest. I'll bring your medicine. Fred did drop it by, didn't he? Reckon you could recall where he put it?"

She collapsed below them in a fit of hysterical crying, no longer able to scream out her frightening yet somehow strangely magnificent prophecies.

Father got off the floor, relieved perhaps that for the first time she had not noticed the liquor on his breath, or had lost all sense of what it meant for him to come home drunk after a night at cards. Everything had changed in an instant. There was no supper on the table.

Ryerson watched as his father got her back to the bedroom and got some of the medicine inside her. He looked at the label on the bottle after he had already fed her two big tablespoonfuls of the stuff.

"Looks like I gave her a double dose. I reckon it won't hurt. I don't think she's been taking it the way she ought to. I think she just forgets."

His father stood outside the door, looking at her as she lay there in the dark.

"What will we do now?" Ryerson asked him.

"Don't quite know, son. First thing is I guess we'll run up to the corner and grab a couple hotdogs. I don't think she's gonna want anything to eat tonight. We'll just have to see how she is in the morning, I guess. Maybe she'll be OK then. I just hope that new medicine will do the trick."

She had been in the sanitarium briefly, and the boy greatly feared that she would have to go back, perhaps for a much longer stay this time.

"Do you think she's . . . "

He wanted to say "crazy" or "mad" or "insane." He couldn't get the word out, but his father understood.

"No," he said, in that way he had of belittling everything. "Just a little trouble with her nerves. Maybe this new medicine will do the trick."

She was still crying, much more softly now, as the double dose of medicine began to take hold. His father shut the door and sat at the kitchen table, his face bleak and pale in the overhead light.

"Will she have to go away?"

"Sure hope not, son. Sure do hope not."

"She acts, well . . . " He still couldn't make himself say the word, but he knew what his father was thinking. He knew what the whole family was thinking.

Later, after they had got back from eating their hotdogs, they found her in a deep sleep. He felt a little better now. Still later, as he lay in bed in the dark, in the room next to his parents,' he kept listening for the crying to start again and heard nothing at all. He began to cry. Maybe she would not survive the overdose.

Then he heard voices, muffled. He couldn't make out whatever was being said. He began to cry again, dreaming of the days before his father had taken to drink, before they had moved into town, thinking of how lovely she was then, of how she would take him to a movie each Saturday afternoon and buy him a Coke at the pharmacy next door to the Carolina Theater.

He was always proud when grownups mistook her for his sister. He knew those days were long past; she would never be as she was then; she would probably have to go away for a while, perhaps for a great while, and he lay half-sleeping and crying into his pillow, knowing that she was right even in her hysteria, knowing that she had always been right, maybe even about all those new people in Washington, knowing from what he had seen in his father's face even before he saw it in hers that the long day which had begun with a great cry of peace, even as his last dime was being gulled from him, was indeed nothing more than the beginning of sorrows and the coming of afflictions like none ever before visited upon the world.

The medicine might calm her down for a while; but how could it alter the terrible truth of what she had spoken, the doom that hung over him even now as he tried to sleep, that hung over all the world in this first night of real peace he had known since the earliest years of his life?