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By Root 2844 0

he seemed with every passing day to carry more proudly the doom printed on his brow. Gabriel watched him run headlong, like David’s headlong son, toward the disaster that had been waiting for him from the moment he had been conceived. It seemed that he had scarcely begun to talk before he cursed. Gabriel often saw him on the streets, playing on the curbstone with other boys his age. Once, when he passed, one of the boys had said: ‘Here comes Reverend Grimes,’ and nodded, in brief, respectful silence. But Royal had looked boldly up into the preacher’s face. He said: ‘Hoe-de-do, Reverend?’ and suddenly, irrepressible, laughed. Gabriel, wishing to smile down into the boy’s face, to pause and touch him on the forehead, did none of these things, but walked on. Behind him, he heard Royal’s explosive whisper: ‘I bet he got a mighty big one!’—and then all the children laughed. It came to Gabriel then how his own mother must have suffered to watch him in the unredeemed innocence that so surely led to death and Hell.

‘I wonder,’ said Deborah idly once, ‘why she called him Royal? You reckon that’s his daddy’s name?’

He did not wonder. He had once told Esther that if the Lord ever gave him a son he would called him Royal, because the line of the faithful was a royal line—his son would be a royal child. And this she had remembered as she thrust him from her; with what had perhaps been her last breath she had mocked him and his father with this name. She had died, then, hating him; she had carried into eternity a curse on him and his.

‘I reckon,’ he said at last, ‘it must be his daddy’s name—less they just given him that name in the hospital up north after … she was dead.’

‘His grandmama, Sister McDonald’—she was writing a letter, and did not look at him as she spoke—‘well, she think it must’ve been one of them boys what’s all time passing through here, looking for work, on their way north—you know? Them real shiftless niggers—well, she think it must’ve been one of them got Esther in trouble. She say Esther wouldn’t never’ve gone north if she hadn’t been a-trying to find that boy’s daddy. Because she was in trouble when she left here’—and she looked up from her letter a moment—‘that’s for certain.’

‘I reckon,’ he said again, made uncomfortable by her unaccustomed chatter, but not daring, too sharply, to stop her. He was thinking of Esther, lying cold and still in the ground, who had been so vivid and shameless in his arms.

‘And Sister McDonald say,’ she went on, ‘that she left here just a little bit of money; they had to keep a-sending her money all the time she was up there almost, specially near the end. We was just talking about it yesterday—she say, look like Esther just decided overnight she had to go, and couldn’t nothing stop her. And she say she didn’t want to stand in the girl’s way—but if she’d’ve known something was the matter she wouldn’t never’ve let that girl away from her.’

‘Seems funny to me,’ he muttered, scarcely knowing what he was saying, ‘that she didn’t think something.’

‘Why she didn’t think nothing, because Esther always told her mother everything—weren’t no shame between them—they was just like two women together. She say she never dreamed that Esther would run away from her if she got herself in trouble.’ And she looked outward, past him, her eyes full of a strange, bitter pity. ‘That poor thing,’ she said, ‘she must have suffered some.’

‘I don’t see no need for you and Sister McDonald to sit around and talk about it all the time,’ he said, then. ‘It all been a mighty long time ago; that boy is growing up already.’

‘That’s true,’ she said, bending her head once more, ‘but some things, look like, ain’t to be forgotten in a hurry.’

‘Who you writing to?’ he asked, as oppressed suddenly by the silence as he had been by her talk.

She looked up. ‘I’m writing to your sister, Florence. You got anything you want me to say?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Just tell her I’m praying for her.’

When Royal was sixteen the war came, and all the young men, first the sons of the mighty, and then the sons of his own people,