A Death in the Family - James Agee [106]
In the silence he could see the auto upside down with its wheels in the air and his father lying beside it with the little blue marks on his chin and on his lip.
“Heck,” one of them said, “how can that kill anybody?”
He felt a kind of sullen stirring among the others, and he felt that he was not believed, or that they did not think very well of his father for being killed so easily.
“It was just exactly the way it just happened to hit him, Uncle Andrew says. He says it was just a chance in a million. It gave him a concush, con, concush—it did something to his brain that killed him.”
“Just a chance in a million,” one of the older boys said gravely, and another gravely nodded.
“A million trillion,” another said.
“Knocked him crazy as a loon,” another cried, and with a waggling forefinger he made a rapid blubbery noise against his loose lower lip.
“Shut yer Goddamn mouth,” an older boy said coldly. “Ain’t you got no sense at all?”
“Way I heard it, ole Tin Lizzie just rolled right back on top of him whomp.”
This account of it was false, Rufus was sure, but it seemed to him more exciting than his own, and more creditable to his father and to him, and nobody could question, scornfully, whether that could kill, as they could of just a blow on the chin; so he didn’t try to contradict. He felt that he was lying, and in some way being disloyal as well, but he said only, “He was instantly killed. He didn’t have to feel any pain.”
“Never even knowed what hit him,” a boy said quietly. “That’s what my dad says.”
“No,” Rufus said. It had not occurred to him that way. “I guess he didn’t.” Never even knowed what hit him. Knew.
“Reckon that ole Tin Lizzie is done for now. Huh?”
He wondered if there was some meanness behind calling it an ole Tin Lizzie. “I guess so,” he said.
“Good ole waggin, but she done broke down.”
His father sang that.
“No more joy rides in that ole Tin Lizzie, huh Rufus?”
“I guess not,” Rufus replied shyly.
He began to realize that for some moments now a bell, the school bell, had been weltering on the dark gray air; he realized it because at this moment the last of its reverberations were fading.
“Last bell,” one of the boys said in sudden alarm.
“Come on, we’re goana git hell,” another said; and within another second Rufus was watching them all run dwindling away up the street, and around the corner into Highland Avenue, as fast as they could go, and all round him the morning was empty and still. He stood still and watched the corner for almost half a minute after the fattest of them, and then the smallest, had disappeared; then he walked slowly back along the alley, hearing once more the sober crumbling of the cinders under each step, and up through the narrow side yard between the houses, and up the steps of the front porch.
In the paper! He looked for it beside the door, but it was not there. He listened carefully, but he could not hear anything. He let himself quietly through the front door, at the moment his Aunt Hannah came from the sitting room into the front hall. She wore a cloth over her hair and in her hands she was carrying the smoking stand. She did not see him at first and he saw how fierce and lonely her face looked. He tried to make himself small but just then she wheeled on him, her lenses flashing, and exclaimed, “Rufus Follet, where on earth have you been!” His stomach quailed, for her voice was so angry it was as if it were crackling with sparks.
“Outdoors.”
“Where, outdoors! I’ve been looking for you all over the place.”
“Just out. Back in the alley.”
“Did you hear me calling you?”
He shook his head.
“I shouted until my voice was hoarse.”
He kept shaking his head. “Honest,” he said.
“Now listen to me carefully. You mustn’t go outdoors today. Stay right here inside this house, do you understand?”
He nodded. He felt suddenly that he had done an awful thing.
“I know it’s hard to,” she said more gently, “but you’ve got to. Help Catherine with