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By Root 6806 0

yet in angry hardness of heart: He who is filthy, let him be filthy still. Then he looked at his mother, seeing, as though she were someone else, the dark, hard lines running downward from her eyes, and the deep, perpetual scowl in her forehead, and the downturned, tightened mouth, and the strong, thin, brown, and bony hands; and the phrase turned against him like a two-edged sword, for was it not he, in his false pride and his evil imagination, who was filthy? Through a storm of tears that did not reach his eyes, he stared at the yellow room; and the room shifted, the light of the sun darkened, and his mother’s face changed. He face became the face that he gave her in his dreams, the face that had been hers in a photograph he had seen once, long ago, a photograph taken before he was born. This face was young and proud, uplifted, with a smile that made the wide mouth beautiful and glowed in the enormous eyes. It was the face of a girl who knew that no evikl could undo her, and who could laugh, surely, as his mother did not laugh now. Between the two faces there stretched a darkness and a mystery that John feared, and that sometimes caused him to hate her.

Now she saw him and she asked, breaking off her conversation with Roy: ‘You hungry, little sleepyhead?’

‘Well! About time you was getting up,’ said Sarah.

He moved to the table and sat down, feeling the most bewildering panic of his life, a need to touch things, the table and chairs and the walls of the room, to make certain that the room existed and that he was in the room. He did not look at his mother, who stood up and went to the stove to heat his breakfast. But he asked, in order to say something to her, and to hear his own voice:

‘What we got for breakfast?’

He realized, with some shame, that he was hoping she had prepared a special breakfast for him on his birthday.

‘What you think we got for breakfast?’ Roy asked scornfully. ‘You got a special craving for something?’

John looked at him. Roy was not in a good mood.

‘I ain’t said nothing to you,’ he said.

‘Oh, I beg your pardon,’ said Roy, in the shrill, little-girl tone he knew John hated.

‘What’s the matter with you to-day?’ John asked, angry, and trying at the same time to lend his voice as husky a pitch as possible.

‘Don’t you let Roy bother you,’ said their mother. ‘He cross as two sticks this morning.’

‘Yeah,’ said John, ‘I reckon.’ He and Roy watched each other. Then his plate was put before him: hominy grits and a scrap of bacon. He wanted to cry, like a child: ‘But, Mama, it’s my birthday!’ He kept his eyes on his plate and began to eat.

‘You can talk about your Daddy all you want to,’ said his mother, picking up her battle with Roy, ‘but one thing you can’t say—you can’t say he ain’t always done his best to be a father to you and to see to it that you ain’t never gone hungry.’

‘I been hungry plenty of times,’ Roy said, proud to be able to score this point against his mother.

‘Wasn’t his fault, then. Wasn’t because he wasn’t trying to feed you. Than man shoveled snow in zero weather when he ought’ve been in bed just to put food in your belly.’

‘Wasn’t just my belly,’ said Roy indignantly. ‘He got a belly, too, I know—it’s a shame the way that man eats. I sure ain’t asked him to shovel no snow for me.’ But he dropped his eyes, suspecting a flaw in his argument. ‘I just don’t want him beating on me all the time,’ he said at last. ‘I ain’t no dog.’

She sighed, and turned slightly away, looking out of the window. ‘Your Daddy beats you,’ she said, ‘because he loves you.’

Roy laughed. ‘That ain’t the kind of love I understand, old lady. What you reckon he’d do if he didn’t love me?’

‘He’d let you go right on,’ she flashed, ‘right on down to hell where it looks like you is just determined to go anyhow! Right on, Mister Man, till somebody puts a knife in you, or takes you off to jail!’

‘Mama,’ John asked suddenly, ‘is Daddy a good man?’

He had not known that he was going to ask the question, and he watched in astonishment as her mouth tightened and her eyes grew dark.

‘That ain’t no kind of