U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [146]
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 time he was ready for highschool he began to find funny things in the Bible, things like the kids talked about when they got tired playing toad in the hole in the deep weeds back of the lumberyard fence, the part about Onan and the Levite and his concubine and the Song of Solomon, it made him feel funny and made his. heart pound when he read it, like listening to scraps of talk among the railroad men in the boardinghouse, and he knew what hookers were and what was happening when women got so fat in front and it worried him and he was careful when he talked to his mother not to let her know he knew about things like that.
Charley's brother Jim had married the daughter of a liverystable owner in Minneapolis. The spring Charley was getting ready to graduate from the eighth grade they came to visit Mrs. Anderson. Jim smoked cigars right in the house and jol ied his mother and while he was there there was no talk of biblereading. Jim took Charley fish-ing one Sunday up the Sheyenne and told him that if he came down to the Twin Cities when school was over he'd give him a job helping round the garage he was starting up in part of his fatherinlaw's liverystable. It sounded good when he told the other guys in school that he had a job in the city for the summer. He was glad to get out as his sister Esther had just come back from taking a course in nursing and nagged him al the time about talking slang and not keeping his clothes neat and eating too much pie. He felt fine the morning he went over to Moorhead
al alone, carrying a suitcase Esther had lent him, to take
-371-the train for the Twin Cities. At the station he tried to buy a package of cigarettes but the man at the newsstand kidded him and said he was too young. When he started it was a fine spring day a little too hot. There was sweat on the flanks of the big horses pul ing the long line of flourwagons that was crossing the bridge. While he was waiting in the station the air became stifling and a steamy mist came up. The sunlight shone red on the broad backs of the grain elevators along the track. He heard one man say to another,