Go tell it on the mountain - James Baldwin [22]
Then Sarah bounded into the room before him, and his mother looked up, reached out for the package, and saw him. She said nothing, but she looked at him with a strange, quick intentness, almost as though there were a warning on her tongue which at the moment she did not dare to utter. His Aunt Florence looked up, and said: ‘We been wondering where you was, boy. This bad brother of yours done gone out and got hisself hurt.’
But John understood from her tone that the fuss was, possibly, a little greater than the danger—Roy was not, after all, going to die. And his heart lifted a little. Then his father turned and looked at him.
‘Where you been, boy,’ he shouted, ‘all this time? Don’t you know you’s needed here at home?’
More than his words, his face caused John to stiffen instantly with malice and fear. His father’s face was terrible in anger, but now there was more than anger in it. John saw now what he had never seen there before, except in his own vindictive fantasies: a kind of wild, weeping terror that made the face seem younger, and yet at the same time unutterably older and more cruel. And John knew, in the moment his father’s eyes swept over him, that he hated John because John was not lying on the sofa where Roy lay. John could scarcely meet his father’s eyes, and yet, briefly, he did, saying nothing, feeling in his heart an odd sensation of triumph, and hoping in his heart that Roy, to bring his father low, would die.
His mother had unwrapped the package and was opening a bottle of peroxide. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘you better wash it with this now.’ Her voice was calm and dry; she looked at his father briefly, her face unreadable, as she handed him the bottle and the cotton.
‘This going to hurt,’ his father said—in such a different voice, so sad and tender!—turning again to the sofa. ‘But you just be a little man and hold still; it ain’t going to take long.’
John watched and listened, hating him. Roy began to moan. Aunt Florence moved to the mantelpiece and put her handbag down near the metal serpent. From the room behind, John heard the baby begin to whimper.
‘John,’ said his mother, ‘go and pick up her up like a good boy.’ Her hands, which were not trembling, were still busy: she had opened the bottle of iodine and was cutting up strips of bandage.
John walked into his parents’ bedroom and picked up the squalling baby, who was wet. The moment Ruth felt him lift her up she stopped crying and stared at him with a wide-eyed, pathetic stare, as though she knew that there was trouble in the house. John laughed at her so ancient-seeming distress—he was very fond of his baby sister—and whispered in her ear as he started back to the living-room: ‘Now, you let your big brother tell you something, baby. Just as soon as you’s able to stand on your feet, you run away from this house, run far away.’ He did not quite know why he said this, or where he wanted her to run, but it made him feel instantly better.
His father was saying, as John came back into the room: ‘I’m sure going to be having some questions to ask you in a minute, old lady. I’m going to be wanting to know just how come you let this boy go out and get half killed.’
‘Oh, no, you ain’t,’ said Aunt Florence. ‘You ain’t going to be starting none of that mess this evening. You know right doggone well that Roy don’t never ask nobody if he can do nothing—he just go right ahead and do like he pleases. Elizabeth sure can’t put no ball and chain on him. She got her hands full right here in this house, and it ain’t her fault if Roy got a head just as hard as his father’s.’
‘You got a awful lot to say, look like for once you could keep from putting your mouth in my business.’ He said this without looking at her.
‘It ain’t my fault,’ she said, ‘that you was born a fool, and always done been a fool, and ain’t never going to change. I swear to my Father you’d try the patience