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By Root 11259 0

make in a little wind. I roll to the door and out onto the porch that Grandmother referred to as the piazza. Ed has brought the rose garden in the courtyard back, though it isn’t what it was in my grandfather’s time. It, with the mown lawn and the pines beyond, stares back at me like an old photograph caught between the ticks of time. It all looks as it looked in my boyhood, when I was back from school for the summer. My eyes have not changed, the St. Paul’s boy is still there. I feel sorry for him, imprisoned in nearly sixty years of living, chained to a chair, caged in a maimed and petrified body. For an instant the familiar grounds glare and tremble, the prisoner rages at his bars. It would be easy to call it quits.

Occasionally I have these moments, not often. There is nothing to do but sit still until they pass. Tantrums and passions I don’t need, endurance is what I need. I have found that it is even possible to take a certain pleasure out of submission to necessity. That have I borne, this can I bear also.

Behind the pines the sun is a shifting dazzle. It breaks through and glitters along the wet grass. Golden-crowned sparrows are hopping and pecking among the roses, a robin cocks his head to the underground noise of a worm out on the lawn, a pine top shakes to the impetuous landing of a jay. Off on the freeway I hear a diesel coming, shifting down as the hill steepens. Each gear is a lower tone, heavier and more laboring. Doppler Effect? Not quite. But I like the sound of these things better when they are shifting upward through their web of gears, not shifting down. Shifting down, they remind me too much of myself.

In the fresh air I light my first cigar of the day, and break the match before I drop it. My chair is a nest of cloth and paper at least as flammable as the California roadside. Then I wheel in, leaving the door open for Ada, and hitch onto the lift and float up into the airier, brighter upper hall. As I detach myself and turn, I can see the study door and the windows in line with it, the pines stirring beyond the windows, the desk waiting with its piles of books and folders of papers and photographs–home of a kind, life of a kind, purpose of a kind.

Do werewolves feel this sense of safety as they creep back just at dawn into some borrowed body?

My mornings are peacefully my own, except for a little conversation-break with Ada when she comes up to make my bed and do up my dishes and get my lunch. If the Giants are on the road, I eat on the porch, listening to the game on the radio. After lunch I lie down for a half hour, more for the change of position than because I need a nap. At any time between one and one thirty–she is no clock watcher –Shelly appears, and we spend an hour or two running down the answers to problems I have encountered during the morning. At three, leaving her to type whatever needs typing, and get ready whatever papers I will need the next morning, I go down into the garden for my daily Gethsemane with the crutches. And even that, because I impose it on myself, I can take a sort of Calvinist pleasure in.

Every association in this place is safe, enduring, and right. The only intrusion is the one I let in myself when I enlisted Shelly, and with Shelly all her grubby entanglements. He is gone, thank the Lord, having appeared to me only once like Peter Quint passing along the edge of the garden–outside, and looking in, but without any particular threat to me. Why should he be interested in me? If he was hanging around figuring out how to leave some cannibal tracks to scare Shelly, as I suppose he was, I would be nothing to him, just the old crip who owned the place. I looked up from my hobbling and there he was across the fence, with his thin ascetic beard and his beaded headband and his purple pants and knee-high moccasins, not sneaking, just strolling with his hands behind his back, following the fence. I went on pegging and swinging, forcing myself through the fifth or sixth or seventh lap, I don’t remember, and we passed like casual walkers in a street. He looked at me pleasantly,