A Death in the Family - James Agee [105]
“He was instantly killed,” Rufus began, and expected to go ahead and correct some of the details of the account, but nobody seemed to hear him, for two other boys had come up and just as he began to speak one of them said, “Your daddy got his name in the paper didn he, and you too,” and he saw that now all the boys looked at him with new respect.
“He’s dead,” he told them. “He got killed.”
“That’s what my daddy says,” one of them said, and the other said, “What you get for driving a auto when you’re drunk, that’s what my dad says,” and the two of them looked gravely at the other boys, nodding, and at Rufus.
“What’s drunk?” Rufus asked.
“What’s drunk?” one of the boys mocked incredulously: “Drunk is fulla good ole whiskey”; and he began to stagger about in circles with his knees weak and his head lolling. “At’s what drunk is.”
“Then he wasn’t,” Rufus said.
“How do you know?”
“He wasn’t drunk because that wasn’t how he died. The wheel hit a rock and the other wheel, the one you steer with, just hit him on the chin, but it hit him so hard it killed him. He was instantly killed.”
“What’s instantly killed?” one of them asked.
“What do you care?” another said.
“Right off like that,” an older boy explained, snapping his fingers. Another boy joined the group. Thinking of what instantly meant, and how his father’s name was in the paper and his own too, and how he had got killed, not just died, he was not listening to them very clearly for a few moments, and then, all of a sudden, he began to realize that he was the center of everything and that they all knew it and that they waited to hear him tell the true account of it.
“I don’t know nothing about no chin,” the boy whose father saw it in the paper was saying. “Way I heard it he was a-drivin along in his ole Tin Lizzie and he hit a rock and ole Tin Lizzie run off the road and throwed him out and run up a eight-foot bank and turned over and over and fell back down on top of him whomp.”
“How do you know?” an older boy was saying. “You wasn’t there. Anyboy here knows it’s him.” And he pointed at Rufus and Rufus was startled from his revery.
“Why?” asked the boy who had just come up.
“Cause it’s his daddy,” one of them explained.
“It’s my daddy,” Rufus said.
“What happened?” asked still another boy, at the fringe of the group.
“My daddy got killed,” Rufus said.
“His daddy got killed,” several of the others explained.
“My daddy says he bets he was drunk.”
“Good ole whiskey!”
“Shut up, what’s your daddy know about it.”
“Was he drunk?”
“No,” Rufus said.
“No,” two others said.
“Let him tell it.”
“Yeah, you tell it.”
“Anybody here ought to know, it’s him.”
“Come on and tell us.”
“Good ole whiskey.”
“Shut your mouth.”
“Well come on and tell us, then.”
They became silent and all of them looked at him. Rufus looked back into their eyes in the sudden deep stillness. A man walked by, stepping into the gutter to skirt them.
Rufus said, quietly, “He was coming home from Grampa’s last night, Grampa Follet. He’s very sick and Daddy had to go up way in the middle of the night to see him, and he was hurrying as fast as he could to get back home because he was so late. And there was a cotter pin worked loose.”
“What’s a cotter pin?”
“Shut up.”
“A cotter pin is what holds things together underneath, that you steer with. It worked loose and fell out so that when one of the front wheels hit a loose rock it wrenched the wheel and he couldn’t steer and the auto ran down off the road with an awful bump and they saw where the wheel you steer with hit him right on the chin and he was instantly killed. He was thrown all the way out of the auto and it ran up an eight-foot emb—embackment and then it rolled back down and it was upside down beside him when they