U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [4]
-7-medicine bottle in its white paper tight in one mittened hand. At the corner of Quince was a group of boys he'd have to pass. Passing wasn't so bad; it was when he was about twenty yards from them that the first snowbal would hum by his ear. There was no comeback. If he
broke into a run, they'd chase him. If he dropped the medicine bottle he'd be beaten up when he got home. A soft one would plunk on the back of his head and the snow began to trickle down his neck. When he was a half a block from the bridge he'd take a chance and run for it.
"Scared cat . . . Shanty Irish . . . Bowlegged Mur-phy . . . Running home to tel the cop" . . . would yel the Polak and Bohunk kids between snowbal s. They made their snowbal s hard by pouring water on them and leaving them to freeze overnight; if one of those hit him it drew blood.
The backyard was the only place you could real y feel safe to play in. There were brokendown fences, dented garbage cans, old pots and pans too nearly sieves to mend, a vacant chickencoop that stil had feathers and droppings on the floor, hogweed in summer, mud in winter; but the glory of the McCrearys' backyard was Tony Harriman's rabbit hutch, where he kept Belgian hares. Tony Harri-man was a consumptive and lived with his mother on the ground floor left. He wanted to raise al sorts of other smal animals too, raccoons, otter, even silver fox, he'd get rich that way. The day he died nobody could find the key to the big padlock on the door of the rabbit hutch. Fainy fed the hares for several days by pushing in cabbage and lettuce leaves through the double thickness of chickenwire. Then came a week of sleet and rain when he didn't go out in the yard. The first fine day, when he went to look, one of the hares was dead. Fainy turned white; he tried to tel himself the hare was asleep, but it lay gawkily stiff, not asleep. The other hares were huddled in a corner looking
-8-about with twitching noses, their big ears flopping helpless over their backs. Poor hares; Fainy wanted to cry. He ran upstairs to his mother's kitchen, ducked under the ironing board and got the hammer out of the drawer in the
kitchen table. The first time he tried he mashed his finger, but the second time he managed to jump the padlock. In-side the cage there was a funny, sour smel . Fainy picked the dead hare up by its ears. Its soft white bel y was be-ginning to puff up, one dead eye was scaringly open. Something suddenly got hold of Fainy and made him drop the hare in the nearest garbage can and run upstairs. Stil cold and trembling, he tiptoed out onto the back porch and looked down. Breathlessly he watched the other hares. By cautious hops they were getting near the door of the hutch into the yard. One of them was out. It sat up on its hind legs, limp ears suddenly stiff. Mom cal ed him to bring her a flatiron from the stove. When he got back to the porch the hares were al gone. That winter there was a strike in the Chadwick Mil s and Pop lost his job. He would sit al day in the front room smoking and cursing:
"Ablebodied man by Jesus, if I couldn't lick any one of those damn Polaks with my crutch tied behind my
back . . . I says so to Mr. Barry; I ain't goin' to join no strike. Mr. Barry, a sensible quiet man, a bit of an invalid, with a wife an' kiddies to think for. Eight years I've been watchman, an' now you give me the sack to take on a bunch of thugs from a detective agency. The dirty pugnosed son of a bitch."
"If those damn lousy furreners hadn't a walked out," somebody would answer soothingly. The strike was not popular on Orchard Street. It meant that Mom had to work harder and harder, doing bigger and bigger boilersful of wash, and that Fainy and his older sister Mil y had to help when they came home
from school. And then one day Mom got sick and had to
-9-go back to bed instead of starting in on the ironing, and lay with her round white creased face whiter than the pil-low and her watercreased hands in a knot under her chin. The doctor came and the district nurse, and al three rooms of the flat smelt of doctors and nurses and drugs, and the only place Fainy and Mil y could find to sit was on the stairs. There they sat and cried quietly together. Then Mom's face on the pil ow shrank into a little creased white thing like a rumpled up handkerchief and they said that she was dead and took her away.