U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [157]
-368-in the aisle and his arms folded and a chewed cigar in the corner of his mouth and an undelivered speech on his desk,
a wilful man expressing no opinion but his own.
CHARLEY ANDERSON
Charley Anderson's mother kept a railroad boarding-house near the Northern Pacific station at Fargo, N. D. It was a gabled frame house with porches al round, painted mustard yel ow with chocolatebrown trim and out back there was always washing hanging out on
sagging lines that ran from a pole near the kitchen door to a row of brokendown chickenhouses. Mrs. Anderson was a quietspoken grayhaired woman with glasses; the boarders were afraid of her and did their complaining about the beds, or the food, or that the eggs weren't fresh to waddling bigarmed Lizzie Green from the north of Ireland who was the help and cooked and did al the housework. When any of the boys came home drunk it
was Lizzie with a threadbare man's overcoat pul ed over her nightgown who came out to make them shut up. One of the brakemen tried to get fresh with Lizzie one night and got such a sock in the jaw that he fel clear off the front porch. It was Lizzie who washed and scrubbed
Charley when he was little, who made him get to school on time and put arnica on his knees when he skinned them and soft soap on his chilblains and mended the rents in his clothes. Mrs. Anderson had already raised three chil-dren who had grown up and left home before Charley came, so that she couldn't seem to keep her mind on Charley. Mr. Anderson had also left home about the time Charley was born; he'd had to go West on account of his
-369-weak lungs, couldn't stand the hard winters, was how Mrs. Anderson put it. Mrs. Anderson kept the accounts, pre-served or canned strawberries, peas, peaches, beans, to-matoes, pears, plums, applesauce as each season came round, made Charley read a chapter of the Bible every day and did a lot of churchwork.
Charley was a chunky little boy with untidy towhair and gray eyes. He was a pet with the boarders and liked things al right except Sundays when he'd have to go to church twice and to sundayschool and then right after dinner his mother would read him her favorite sections of Matthew or Esther or Ruth and ask him questions about the chapters he'd been assigned for the week. This lesson took place at a table with a red tablecloth next to a window that Mrs. Anderson kept banked with pots of patience-plant, wandering jew, begonias and ferns summer and winter. Charley would have pins and needles in his legs and the big dinner he'd eaten would have made him
drowsy and he was terribly afraid of committing the sin against the holy ghost which his mother hinted was in-attention in church or in sundayschool or when she was reading him the Bible. Winters the kitchen was absolutely quiet except for the faint roaring of the stove or Lizzie's heavy step or puffing breath as she stacked the dinner-dishes she'd just washed back in the cupboard. Summers it was much worse. The other kids would have told him about going swimming down in the Red River or fishing or playing fol ow my leader in the lumberyard or on the coalbunkers back of the roundhouse and the caught flies would buzz thinly in the festooned tapes of flypaper and he'd hear the yardengine shunting freightcars or the through train for Winnipeg whistling for the station and the bel clanging, and he'd feel sticky and itchy in his stiff col ar and he'd keep looking up at the loudticking porcelain clock on the wal . It made the time go too slowly to look up at the clock often, so he wouldn't let himself
-370-look until he thought fifteen minutes had gone by, but when he looked again it'd only be five minutes and he'd feel desperate. Maybe it'd be better to commit the sin against the holy ghost right there and be damned good and proper once and for al and run away with a tramp the way Dolphy Olsen did, but he didn't have the nerve. By the