Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [111]
I went up to the attic and found some lovely silk and cotton and lawn from which I will make baby clothing for you — little night-gowns and bunting and so forth. I know that it is bad luck to make the christening gown ahead of time, so I will not do that, though I will look at patterns.
Oh, Honora, I cannot tell you how much joy your news has given me.
Now remember, it is very important to eat right when a baby is coming. I had terrible cravings for donuts when Charles was on the way, and if it hadn’t been for your father’s good sense, that’s all I’d have eaten for months.
Please write me often, dear. I am most eager for any news.
Love,
Mother
Alphonse
His breath is tight and there is a pain in his side that he knows will not go away. He sprints along the road that runs through the marshes and he is moving so fast that he keeps surprising birds and ducks, which squawk and leap out of the grasses and flutter for a moment in his face before flying away. It is high tide in the marshes, and he thinks it is amazing the way it can be so beautiful and quiet and calm here at the beach while in the city there was screaming and flying rocks and fires and smoke, and then the shots. And then they were all at Rose Street, and he is pretty sure he will never forget the expression on his mother’s face, or the way Marie-Thérèse stood with her fists to her mouth and whimpered and carried on like it was she who was hurt and bleeding and not some stranger she had never met.
Mrs. Beecher is going to be very, very upset, and why oh why does it have to be Alphonse who has to tell her?
Run, Ross said when they had made it up the stairs, four men carrying the wounded man as if he were a rolled rug, one leg falling against a step and the man waking out of a dead stupor to scream that one time and all the smears of blood on the wooden steps as Alphonse brought up the rear.
Alphonse ran out to the Ely Road, thinking he could take the trolley, but then he realized that would take too long and so he stuck his thumb out and a rusted red vegetable truck came hunkering along and Alphonse got in the back and sat with the rotting cabbages and jumped off when the truck came to a stop near the beach road.
You could tell all day that something bad was going to happen. Ever since Monday morning, all of the picketers had been in a sulky mood, and last night it was so hot and so sticky you couldn’t even breathe inside the house, never mind move or sleep, and you could just see this morning on the line how hot and annoyed everybody was, as if they’d just been insulted and hadn’t been able to think of a snappy answer back.
First there were a few rocks and then there was some shouting and shoving, or maybe it was the other way around, and Mironson tried to get everyone’s attention and said, Hello there! and Hey! and Wait a minute! and finally STOP! But no one was giving him any mind, and the militia and the police just stood on the other side of the street protecting the scabs, looking like a wall that was never going to move. The crowd was kind of surging forward and backward and growing thicker and thicker as people got the news that finally, thank God, something interesting was about to happen. And Alphonse remembers the girls, teenage girls in their summer dresses and their hats, all trying to get on top of cars and saying, What’s going on? And then Mironson jumped up on the hood of a Model T that wasn’t going anywhere, and this seemed to Alphonse like a very bad idea, making himself a target like that when everyone could see the militia and the police were about to die of heat prostration in their uniforms and wanted to get this thing over with, and that was when Alphonse heard the first shot.
A policeman dropped, just dropped where he was standing, nothing dramatic, no clutching of the heart like