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[Assistant] What happened? Who killed this thing? It was just breathing. I wanted to play with it. Christopher. When you're not here to look at me, I have to laugh at your absurd powers. Your incontinent, unique energy. As for me, I gave birth to someone else's child.


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[Assistant] There's a brochure inside the brown bottle that the doctor assigned us, very gay, full color, busy with children riding their bicycles right through patches of daffodils.


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[Assistant] Sleeping square in the middle of their pillows doing their homework.


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[Assistant] Epilepsy, heart and circulatory complications, severe myopia and related eye problems.


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[Assistant] See Journal of Pediatric Medicine, Volume 3, Number 136, February 71, Pharmacology Bulletin, Volume 798.


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[Assistant] Do not allow children access to pills. Special feature, you locket cap. Remember, teach your child the etiquette of the medicine cabinet. I know how he dreams me. I know because I dream his dreams. He runs to hide in me.


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[Assistant] Battered by the stick of the old dark, he comes fast, hiccuping terror.


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[Assistant] By the time I am upholding him, it has hobbled off, it must be, into his memory. I've pulled on a robe, I spread my arms. Do they look winged or webbed? To pull him out of himself, hide him, swear the witch is nowhere near. He doesn't go to his father, but he won't look at my face. It was you! He looks up at me finally and says nothing.


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[Assistant] But I see him thinking. So, I was the witch with a club behind my bent back.


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[Assistant] I, the hundred stalked flower with webbed branches.


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[Assistant] I, with the flayed face held in my two hands, like a bloody towel. Then how can I help him? I whisper to him, wordless, just a music. He answers, mama. It is a faint knocking, through layers of dirt, through flowers.


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[Assistant] His sister Jodie will dream those dreams, and all the children who will follow her.


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[Assistant] I suppose she will. Like chickenpox, every child can expect them.


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[Assistant] There's a three o'clock in the dark night of children's souls, too. Let's not be too arrogant taking our prerogatives. But if she does, she'll dream them alone, no accomplices.


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[Assistant] I won't meet her halfway. Give her my own last Philip, myself in shreds.


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[Assistant] I've been keeping a sort of log. A day in life.


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[Assistant] For no purpose, since my sense of futility runs deeper than any data can testify to. Still it cools me off. He's playing with Jacqueline. They're in the Rosenberg's yard.


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[Assistant] Christopher is on his way to the sandbox, which belongs to Jackie's baby brother, Brian. So I see trouble ahead. I will not interfere. No, intervene is the word they use. Interfere is not as objective.


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[Assistant] Christopher pulls up two peonies, knocks over Brian's big blonde blocky wooden horse.


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[Assistant] For which he has to stop and plant his feet very deliberately.


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[Assistant] Kicks over short picket fence around tulips, finally gets to sandbox, walks up to Jackie, whose back is to him, and pushes her hard. She falls against fence and goes crying to her mother with a splinter. She doesn't even bother to retaliate, knowing him too well. Then he leans down into the sand, turns to me again, that innocent face.


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[Assistant] It is not conniving or falsely naive, I swear it's not. He isn't that kind of clever.


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[Assistant] Nor is he a gruff bully boy who likes to fly from trees and conquer turf.


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[Assistant] He has a small, peaked face. A little French, I think.


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[Assistant] On which his dark hair lies flat like a salon haircut. Anything but a bully. This helpless child of mine.


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[Assistant] He has a weird, natural elegance that terrifies me, as though it is true what I feel, that he was intended to be someone else. Now he seems to be saying, well take all this stuff away if you don't want me to touch it.


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[Assistant] Get me out of this goddamn museum. Who says I'm not provoked? That's what you say to each other. Why is he not class?


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[Assistant] He will break us all without so much as chipping.


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[Assistant] The worst thing I can think. I am dozing in the sun. Christopher is in kindergarten. Jodie is napping.


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[Assistant] And I am guiltily trying to coax a little color into my late fall power. It's a depressing, bleary sun up there. But I sleep a little, waking in fits and snatches.


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[Assistant] When Migdalia next door lets her kid have it and his wine sails across the yards.


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[Assistant] And when the bus shakes the earth all the way under the gas mains and water pipes to China, the worst thing is crawling through my head like a stream of red ants. What if he and I, Howie and I had been somewhere else way back that night we smiled and nodded and made Christopher. If the night had been bone cracking cold,


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[Assistant] If we were courting some aloneness back to back, but it was summer.


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[Assistant] We were married three months, and the bottom sheet was spread like a picnic cloth. If there is an astrologer's clock,


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[Assistant] That's what we heard announcing to us the time was propitious. But I rehearsed the time again.


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[Assistant] We lived off Riverside Drive that year, and the next?


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[Assistant] I will float a thunder cloud across the river from the palisades. And just as Howie turns to me,


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[Assistant] I will have the most extraordinary burst of rain, sludgy and cold, explode through the open windows everywhere and finish us for the evening.


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[Assistant] The rugs are soaked, our books on the desk are corrugated with dampness. We snap at each other, how he breaks a beer glass and blames me. We unmake him. Another night, we will make a different child.


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[Assistant] Don't the jeans shift daily in their milky medium, like lottery tickets in their fishbowl?


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[Assistant] A single sperm thrust out of its soft side, retreating. Arrow swimming backwards, tail drags the heavy head away from life. All the probability in the universe cheers. He is unjoined.


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[Assistant] I wake in a clammy sweat. The sun such as it was is caught behind the smokestacks at the far end of Pacific Street.


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[Assistant] And there's that fine perpetual silt on my arms and legs and face, the con-ed sunburn. I go in and start making lunch for Christopher, who will survive me.


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[Assistant] He is sitting at the kitchen table trying to string kidney beans on a needle and thread.


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[Assistant] They do it in kindergarten. I forgot to ask why.


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[Assistant] Jodie wakes upstairs, way at the back of the house with her door closed, and Christopher says quietly, without looking up from his string, Ma, she's up.


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[Assistant] He seems to make a very special effort to be gentle with his little sister. I can see him forcibly subdue himself, tuck his hands inside his pockets, or push them into the loops of his pants so that he loses no honor in restraint. But every now and then it gets the better of him. He walked by her just a minute ago.


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[Assistant] And did just what he does to anything that's not nailed down or bigger than he is. Gave her a casual but precise push.


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[Assistant] The way the bath mat slips into the tub without protest, the glass bowl gets smashed, its pieces settling with a resigned tinkle. I am, of course, the one who's resigned.


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[Assistant] I hear them ring against each other before they hit the ground, in the silence that envelops the show. This time Jodie chose to lie back on the rug. Fortunately it wasn't cement. I am grateful for small favors. And watch him. An amazing, endearing thing for a two year old. I think she has all the control that was meant for the two of them. And this is fair to neither. Eyes wide open.


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[Assistant] Untierful, Jodie the antidote was thinking something about her brother. She cannot say what.


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[Assistant] When his dosage has been up a while, he begins to cringe before her. It is unpredictable and unimaginable, but true, and I bear witness to it here. As I was writing the above, he ran in and hid behind my chair. Along came Jodie, who had just righted herself after the attack on her. She was pulling her corn-popper, vaguely humming. For Christopher, an imagined assault, provoked,


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[Assistant] Howard, on his way out of the breakfast chaos, bears his briefcase like a shield.


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[Assistant] Holds it in front of him for lack of space while he winds his way around the table in our little alcove, planting firm kisses on our foreheads.


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[Assistant] On his way out the door he can be expected to say something cheerful and blind.


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[Assistant] We never had any others, so how do we know where they fall on the spectrum? We know, I said. What about Jody?


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[Assistant] Oh, he said waving her away like a fly. I mean boys.


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[Assistant] We also know because we're not knots on logs, some of us, that's how we know. What was it he did to your shaver this morning? Smashed it to smithereens is what he did and left cobweb cracks in the mirror he threw it at. To which his father shrugged and turned to pull the gate shut fast.


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[Assistant] Why did we have Jodie? People dare to ask, astonished, though it's none of their business. They mean and expect us to forgive them. How could we take such a martyr's chance?


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[Assistant] I tell them that when Christopher was born I was ready for a large family.


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[Assistant] You can't be a secretary forever, no matter how many smash titles your boss edits. Nor an administrative assistant, nor an indispensable right hand. I've got my own arms, for which I need all the hands I've got. I like to be boss, thank you, in my own house. It's a routine by now, canned as an Alka-Seltzer ad. But I'll tell you,


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[Assistant] For a long time I guarded very tensely against having another baby. Christopher was hurting me too much. Already he was.


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[Assistant] Howard would rap with his fist on my nightgown side, demanding admission. For a while I played virgin. I mean, I didn't try, I wasn't playing. He just couldn't make any headway. I've heard it called diss-something. Also crossbones to get right down to what it's like.


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[Assistant] I bet there's some drugs, some muscle relaxant that bones you and...


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[Assistant] Just lays you out on the knife like a chicken to be stuffed in trust. Even though it wasn't his fault.


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[Assistant] I'll never forgive Howard for using his fists on me, even as gently and facetiously as he did.


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[Assistant] Finally, I guess he got tired of trying to disarm me one night at a time.


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[Assistant] Or bringing wine to bed or dancing with me obscenely like a kid at a petting party.


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[Assistant] Or otherwise trying to distract me while he stole up on me. So that's when he convinced me to have another baby. I guess it seemed easier. We'll make Christopher our one exceptional child while we surround him with ordinary ones. We'll grow a goddamn garden around him. He'll be outnumbered. Well, I bought it. We could make this child matter less. It was an old and extravagant solution.


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[Assistant] Ah, he lied with his hand between my legs. He swore the next would be just as beautiful, but timid. Downright phlegmatic, how's that? And would teach Christopher to be human. So I sighed, desperate to believe.


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[Assistant] And unlocked my thighs, going rusty and stiff. But I'll tell you, right as he turned out, by luck, to be, I think I never trusted him again. One of my two deceitful boys. Because whatever abandon I once had is gone. Sure as my waist is gone. I feel it now, and Howard is punished for it. Starting right then, making Jodie,


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[Assistant] I have dealt myself out in careful proportions, like an unreliable cook bent only on her batter. Meanwhile, I lose one lamp, half the ivory on the piano keys,


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[Assistant] On the same day I lose my temper, lose it so irretrievably that I am tempted to pop one of Christopher's little red pills myself and go quietly.


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[Assistant] Who's the most frightening? The skimpy six-year-old flying around on the tail of his bird of prey?


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[Assistant] Or his indispensable right hand mama smashing the canned goods into the closet with a sound generally reserved for the shooting range. All the worse.


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[Assistant] Off his habit for a few days, his eyes clear, his own. He's trying to be sweet.


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[Assistant] He smiles wantly whenever some catastrophe overtakes him. Like an actor with no conviction. But someone else controls his muscles. He is not riding it now.


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[Assistant] But lives in the beak of something huge and dark that dangles him just out of my reach. Our brains are all circuitry, not very imaginative. I tend to see it blue and red and yellow like the wires in phones, easier to sort impulses that way.


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[Assistant] I want to see inside Christopher's head. I stare viciously though I try to do it when he's involved with something else. He never is. He would fill me a hundred light years behind him. I vow never to study him again. It's futile anyway. His forehead's not a one-way mirror. Promises.


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[Assistant] Always my promises, they are glass. I know when they shatter. Know when he shatters them, throwing something of value. There will be edges to draw blood. Edges everywhere. He says, what are you looking at all the time? Bad Christopher the Dragon? He looks wilted, pathetic, seen through. But I haven't seen a thing. Chrissy.


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[Assistant] He doesn't read yet, I know that's why. It's all upside down or somehow mixed together. Cubist site, is there such a thing?


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[Assistant] He sees my face and the top of my head, say, at the same time.


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[Assistant] Or everything looms at him, quivering like a funhouse mirror, swollen, then slowly disappears down to a point. He has to subdue it before it overtakes him? How would we ever know? Why, if he saw just what we see, the cool and calm of all the things of the world, all sorted out like laundry? Oh, Margaret, come off it.


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[Assistant] Like a terrier being dragged around by his collar, his small face thrust forward into his own perpetual messes. He comes to me just for a second, pulling on his tan windbreaker, already breathing fast to run away somewhere. And while I hold him tight a minute, therapeutic hug for both of us, he pinches my arm until the purple capillaries dance with pain.


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[Assistant] Let me take him with me when I go to DC next week. Howard. I stare at him. You've gotta be kidding.


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[Assistant] No, why would I care about it? We'll manage. We can go see some buildings after my conference is out. Go to the Smithsonian. He'd love the giant pendulum.


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[Assistant] His eyes are already there in the cool of the great vaulted room where everything echoes and everything can break. I am fascinated by his casualness. What would he do all day while you're in your meeting, friend, my intrepid friend?


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[Assistant] There's that slightly conniving look my husband gets that makes me forget goddamn it why I married him.


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[Assistant] In front of the grade A educational television that's raging back.


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[Assistant] The next week, Howie goes to Washington, and we all go to the airport to see him off. I don't know what Howard told him.


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[Assistant] While Jodie sleeps, Christopher cries noisily in the back of the car and flings himself around so wildly like a caged bear.


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[Assistant] Most of the kids in kindergarten with Christopher walk past our house alone, solidly bearing straight west with the bland eight o'clock sun at their backs.


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[Assistant] They concentrate. They've been told not to cross heavy traffic alone, not to speak to strangers, not to dawdle. All the major wisdom of motherhood pinned to their jackets like a permission slip.


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[Assistant] Little orders turning into habits and hardening slowly to superego, an amber that holds commands forever. Christopher lacks it the way


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[Assistant] And that means the neighborhood's been stripped of summer and fall as surely as if a man came by one day, confiscating color. What little there is, you wouldn't think it could matter. Blame the mayor. The window boxes are crowded.


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[Assistant] Our noble pint-sized trees have shrunk back into themselves. They lose five years in winter.


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[Assistant] Fontaine, always improving his property, has painted his new brick wall silver over the weekend.


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[Assistant] It has a sepulchral gleam in the vague sunlight.


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[Assistant] Next door to him, the Rosenbergs have bought subtle aged wood shutters. They look like some dissected Vermont barn door.


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[Assistant] And a big rustic barrel that will stand achingly empty all winter. Weighted with a hundred pounds of dirt to exhaust the barrel burglars.


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[Assistant] I wonder what my illusions look like through the front window. Christopher's off and running. Not in the street!


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[Assistant] I get so tired of my voice. Especially because I know he doesn't hear it. Stay on the curb, Christopher!


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[Assistant] There's enough damage to be done there. He's swinging on that new couple's gate, straining the hinges, trying to fan up a good wind.


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[Assistant] Then when I look up from attending to Jody's dropped and splintered Ritz cracker, he's gone. Clapping together two garbage can lids across the street. Always under an old lady's window.


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[Assistant] Though with no particular joy, his job, it's there to be done.


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[Assistant] Jodie is left with her stroller bricked against a tree for safekeeping while I retrieve him. No one ever told me I'd grow up to be a shepherdess. I'm bad at it too. Undone by a single sheep.


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[Assistant] We are somehow at the corner. At least I can demand he hold my hand and drag us across the street.


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[Assistant] Where the crossing guard stands and winks at me daily, as dependably as a blinking light. She is a good lady, Mrs. Cortez, from a couple of blocks down in the projects, with many matching daughters, one son, Anibal, on the sixth grade honor roll, and another on Riker's Island, a junkie.


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[Assistant] She's waving cars and people forward in waves, demonstrating community involvement.


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[Assistant] I recognize something deep behind her lively eyes sunk there. A certain desperate casualness while the world has its way with her children. Another shepherdess without a chance. I give her my little salute.


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[Assistant] By now, my feet heavy with the monotony of this trip. We were on the long school block.


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[Assistant] The barbed wire of the playground breaks for the entrance halfway down. This street, unlived on, is an unrelenting tangle.


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[Assistant] No one ever sees the generous souls who bequeath their dead cars to the children, but there are dozens in various stages of decay. They must make regular deliveries. Christopher's castles.


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[Assistant] Creative playthings, and broken already so he never gets blamed. For some reason he picks the third one.


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[Assistant] Feeling middle-aged and worrying about my skirt hiked up over my rear, he is tussling not with one boy, but with two. They fight over nothing. Just lock hands and wrestle as a kind of greeting. I break the muffa's head, one announces matter-of-factly. Second grader, maybe. Christopher doesn't fight for stakes like that, though. Whoever wants his head can have it. He's fighting to get his hands on something. Keep them warm.


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[Assistant] I am reaching over the jagged door, which is split in two and full of rainwater. The school bell rings, that raspy grinding, and the two boys with a whoop leap over the downed windshield and are gone. Christopher is greater scraped along one cheek, but we have arrived more or less in one piece.


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[Assistant] I decide I'd better come in with him and see to it his cheek is washed off.


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[Assistant] He is, of course, long gone by the time I park the stroller and take the baby out. He never bothers to say goodbye. Maybe six-year-olds don't.


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[Assistant] I pull open the heavy door to PS193. It comes reluctantly like it's in many parts. These doors are not for children. But then neither is the school. It's a fairly new building.


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[Assistant] The 1939 World's Fair architecture is just about caught up with the lobby. Those heavy, streamlined effects. A ship, that's what it looks like. A dated ocean liner.


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[Assistant] There's a big lit up case to the left that shows off sparse student pieties, untouchable as seven layer cakes at the bakery. This land is your land. This land is my land. Every figure in the pictures, brown, black, dead white, blank.


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[Assistant] Connected more or less at the wrist like uncut paper dolls. Hands across the seat.


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[Assistant] The whole world's afraid to drop hands, the hell with summit talks, salt talks, we're on the buddy system.


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[Assistant] Well, they go up and down the halls, irrevocably linked so, their lips sealed, the key thrown over their endless shoulder, only the teacher nattering on and on about discipline and respect, wearing heels that must sound like SS boots, though they are intended merely to mean business. Christopher tells me only that his teachers are noisy and hurt his ears. He does not bother to specify how.


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[Assistant] Unnecessary shine on the floor, an invitation, and takes it. That worried crease between big eyes. His face looks back at him out of deep water. Deeper when he's drugged. So he careens around without ice skates.


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[Assistant] Knocks against other kids hard. Thumps into closed doors. Nearly cracks open this land as your land.


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[Assistant] He is the wise acre who dances to hold the door for his class. Then, when the last dark pigtail is through,


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[Assistant] Skips off in the wrong direction. Leaps the steps to the gym or the auditorium.


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[Assistant] Or whatever lives down there in deserted silence most of the morning, the galley of this ship. I don't blame them, of course I don't. But that isn't the point, is it?


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[Assistant] I am deprived of these fashionable, rebellious points. We only, madam, allow those in control to be out of control, as it were, if you follow. Your son, madam, is not rebelling. He is unable, is beyond, is utterly, is unthinkable. Catch him before we do.


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[Assistant] We are certainly late, the lines are all gone, the kids settling into their rooms, their noise dwindling like a cutback motor. Jodie and I just stand for a minute or two, tuning in. Her head is heavy on my shoulder.


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[Assistant] Already there's a steady monitor traffic. The officious kids scurrying to do their teacher's bidding like tailless mice. I was one of them for years and years. God. Faceless and obliging. Official blackboard eraser.


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[Assistant] Which meant a few cool, solitary minutes just before three each day, down in the basement store room, clapping two erasers together hard, till they smoked with the day's vanished lessons. I would hardly have stopped my frantic do-gooding to give the time of day


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[Assistant] I can see myself going the other way if I saw him coming towards me in a narrow hall. This hall, just like the ones I grew up in,


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[Assistant] Except for the modernistic shower tile that reaches halfway up, has a muted, darkened feeling, an underwater thrum. Even the tile is like the Queen's Midtown Tunnel, deserted. I will not be particularly welcome in Christopher's kindergarten room. There is that beleaguered


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[Assistant] proprietary feeling that any parent is a spy or come to complain. I, in my own category, have been forbidden to complain, at least tacitly.


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[Assistant] Having been told that my son really needs one whole teacher to himself. If not for his sake, then for the safety of the equipment.


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[Assistant] And the consumables of which he is not one.


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[Assistant] Christopher has disappeared into his class which, I see it through the little porthole, is neat and earnest.


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[Assistant] Not so terribly different from a third grade room, say.


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[Assistant] With its alphabets and exhortations to patriotism and virtue above eye level. They are allowed to paint in one color at a time. A few, I see, have graduated to two. They must be disciplined, promising children in their securely tied smocks. One spring, they will hatch into monitors. Christopher is undoubtedly banned from the painting corner. Classroom economy? Margaret, your kitchen, your bedroom,


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[Assistant] Searching for the glass mines hidden between the tiles. Mrs. Seabury is inspecting hands. The children turn them patty-cake and step back when she finishes her scrutiny, which is as grave as the doctor's. Oh, Christopher.


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[Assistant] She has sent him and another little boy to the sink to scrub. To throw water, that is.


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[Assistant] And stick their fingers in the spout in order to shower the children in the back of the room.


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[Assistant] Mrs. Seabury is the kind of teacher who, with all her brown and black kids on one side of the room, this morning in the back getting showered, talks about discrimination and means big from little, forward from backward, ass from elbow.


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[Assistant] Now I see she has made Christopher an honorary black child, or maybe one of your more rambunctious Puerto Ricans. They're all masked back there with a special inattention of the aide, who is one of my least favorite people. She's very young.


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[Assistant] And wears a maxi skirt that the kids keep stepping on when she bends down. Therefore, she bends down as little as possible.


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[Assistant] The future felons of America and their Danmother.


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[Assistant] I'm caught somewhere between my first flash of anger and then shame at what I suppose, wearily, is arrogance. What am I angry at? That he has attained pariahood with them?


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[Assistant] Overcoming his impeccable WASP heritage in a single leap of adrenaline. Jesus.


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[Assistant] Unruly characters he's supposed to be afraid of.


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[Assistant] Latchkey babies, battered boys and abused girls, or loved but hungry, scouted by rats while they sleep.


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[Assistant] Products of this and that converging, social, political, economic, each little head impaled on a point of a grid. Christopher, my warm, healthy,


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[Assistant] Nursed and coddled, vitamin-enriched boy, born on Blue Cross, swaddled in his grandparents' gifts from Lord and Taylor. What in the hell is our excuse? My pill-popping baby. So sad, so reduced, and taken from himself when he's on. So indescribable, airborne when he's off. This week he is off. I'm sneaking him a favor.


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[Assistant] I see him now flapping around in a sort of ragged circle with the other unimaginables, under the passive eye of that aid. Crows? Buzzards? Not pigeons, anyway. They make their own rowdy music.


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[Assistant] And stops short, slamming a half dozen kids together, solid rear-end collisions. It looks like the New Jersey turnpike. Everybody whiplash, tumbling down. No reason. No whys. There's never anything to explain. Was the room taking off, spinning him dizzy? Was he fending something off, or trying to catch hold? The others turned to him.


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[Assistant] Shouts so loud I can hear them out here where I'm locked. Underwater. And they all pile on. Oh, can they pile? It's a sport in itself.


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[Assistant] Feet and hands and dark faces deepening a shade. The egg gets out of the way, picking her skirt out of the rubble of children at her feet. One heavy, dark boy with no wrists finally breaks through the victor. His foot is on Christopher's neck.


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[Assistant] When I make myself turn back, the crowd is unraveling as Mrs. Seabury approaches.


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[Assistant] This stranger and her cohorts have him by his pale limp neck. They are teaching him how to lose. For me, how to win. My son is down for the count, breathing comfortably, accommodating, only his fingers twitching fiercely at his sides, like gill slits puffing. While I stand outside, a baby asleep on my shoulder. I am the traitor.


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[Assistant] He sees me through my one-way mirror and he is right. I am the witch. Every day they walk on his neck. I see that now. But he will never tell me about it. I weep, but cannot move.


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[Assistant] As well as if a prominent reward.


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[Assistant] Send out to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.


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[Assistant] This is Christopher Tillman reading Christmas Gift by Robert Panwaran from the Virginia Quarterly Review.


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[Assistant] The big white flakes sank down from the sagging sky. A wet gray light hung over everything, and the flakes looked gray against it, then turned white as they sank toward the dark earth.


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[Assistant] The roofs of the few houses along the road look soggy and black.


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[Assistant] The man who sat in the wagon that moved slowly up the road wore an old quilt wrapped around his shoulders and a corduroy cap pulled down over his eyes.


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[Assistant] His ears stuck out from under the cap, thin as paper and lined with purplish veins.


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[Assistant] Before him, vanishing, the flakes touched the backs of the mules, which steamed and were black like wet iron.


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[Assistant] When the man spoke to the boy on the seat beside him, the ends of his mustache twitched the amber drops that clung to it. You can get off at the store, he said.


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[Assistant] The boy nodded his head, which looked tight and small under the rusty felt man's hat he wore. The hoofs of the mules cracked the skim ice in the ruts, and pale yellow mud oozed up around the fetlocks.


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[Assistant] Their heads hanging under the sparse downward drift of flakes. Whoa, he said, after the mules had already stopped.


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[Assistant] He pointed his thumb toward the frame building set beside the road. You can get off here, son, he said. Most like they can tell you here.


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[Assistant] The boy climbed over the side of the wagon, set his foot on the hub and jumped.


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[Assistant] His feet sank in the half-frozen viscous mud. Turning, he took a step toward the building and stopped. Much obliged, he said, and started on.


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[Assistant] For a moment the man peered after him from small red-rimmed eyes. He dirked the reins.


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[Assistant] Get up, he said, and the mules lay against the traces, their hoofs crackling the skim ice.


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[Assistant] The boy mounted the steps to the sloping boards of the porch and put his sharp gray claw-like fingers on the latch bar. Very quietly he pushed the door inward a little space, slipped his body through the opening, and closed the door, letting the latch back down without a sound.


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[Assistant] He looked down the shadowy corridor of the store between the shelves of cans and boxes and the clothing hung on racks against the other wall. At the end of the corridor some men sat.


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[Assistant] Their bodies and huddled outline against the red glow of a stove.


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[Assistant] With hesitant steps, the boy approached them, stopping just behind the circle.


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[Assistant] A big man, whose belly popped the broad leather belt he wore, let his tear come forward to rest on the floor, and surveyed him. What can I do for you today, buddy? he said.


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[Assistant] The tight skin of the boy's face puckered grayly toward the lips, and his Adam's apple twitched up his throat.


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[Assistant] The big man kept on looking at the boy who stood dumbly beyond the circle, the oversized mackinaw hanging to his knees, and shook his head at the big man. You want to get warmed up? the big man said. The boy shook his head again. No, sir, he managed. You look cold, the big man said. You come round here. He motioned to the open space in front of the stove.


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[Assistant] Eyes fixed in question on the big man's face, the boy obeyed the gesture.


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[Assistant] He came round, carefully stepping over a man's out-thrust leg. He stood inside the circle, about six feet from the stove, and spread his hands out to it. Get up closer, the big man said. Get your bottom up to hit. The boy moved forward and turned his back to the stove, his hands behind him working weakly toward the warmth. The men kept looking at him. Steam from the mackinaw rose up against the stove.


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[Assistant] And he sat with his booted legs bunched under him like an animal ready to spring.


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[Assistant] Bucking his chair nearer to the boy. Now ain't that nice, he said. Pleased to meet you. So you're one of Milt's little bastards.


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[Assistant] The bald, swarthy man glared at him, shut up, he ordered abruptly.


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[Assistant] The other man leaned elaborately back and studied the ceiling, softly whistling between his teeth.


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[Assistant] In doing your Saturday trading, the bald swarthy one said. The boy shook his head. Then he looked at the big man. I want to get the doctor.


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[Assistant] That's what he's for, the big man admitted and blinked at the stove. You're folks sick, the bald swarthy man said. My sister, the boy said. She's going to have a baby. The man who was whistling stopped. You're a little sister, buddy. He addressed the ceiling in mock solicitude and shook his head. Damn Lancaster's all this did, calf young. It's my big sister, the boy said, the bald man.


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[Assistant] She come up here last summer. She ain't nothing but my sister on my ma's side. Well, well, said the man who was looking at the ceiling.


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[Assistant] He let his chair thump down on the front legs and spoke to no one in particular.


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[Assistant] So there's gonna be a no little bastard out to Milt's place.


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[Assistant] The bald, swirthy man stared glumly across the speaker. Bill Stover, he commented with no feeling, you gonna make me stomp hell out of you for son. The boy glanced quickly from one side to the other.


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[Assistant] The bald swarthy man stared across the space, his legs bunched under him. The other man grinned and winked sideways. I ought to do it now, the bald swarthy one said, as if to himself. The other stopped grinning. If you want the dock, the big man said.


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[Assistant] You go up the road, four houses on the right hand side, it ain't no peace. That's where Doc Small lives. There's a office in the front yard smack on the road, but you go up to the house, that's where he is. It's a chicken office, one of the men said.


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[Assistant] That's the way the doc keeps his chickens, now going on twenty years. You ain't gonna miss it, the big man said.


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[Assistant] The boy came out of the circle and stepped before the big man. He looked up with a quick furtive motion of his head. Much obliged, he said.


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[Assistant] He pulled his Mackinaw about him, taking up the slack in the garment, and moved down the corridor toward the door. Wait a minute, the big man called after him.


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[Assistant] He got up ponderously to his feet, hitched his belt up in his belly, and went forward to the single glass showcase.


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[Assistant] The man watched him, craning their necks, all except the bald swarthy one, who crouched and stared at the red bulge of the stove.


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[Assistant] The big man reached into the glass showcase and took out a half dozen sticks of red stripe candy.


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[Assistant] He thrust them at the boy, who, looking suspiciously at the objects, shook his head. Take them, the man ordered. The boy kept his hands in the pockets of the mackinaw. I ain't got nothing to pay for it with, he said. Here, take them, buddy, the man said. The boy reached out his hand uneasily.


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[Assistant] All the while studying the man's face, which was without expression.


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[Assistant] The fingers scaled gray by cold like a bird's claw.


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[Assistant] Closed on the candy, jerked back, clutching the sticks.


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[Assistant] The big man came back to the stove and sank morosely into his chair. He tilted it back and put his arms behind his head, on which the thin brown hair was slickly parted. You sick, Al? one of the men said to him. He did not answer.


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[Assistant] Whose dark eyes burned with a kind of indolent savagery.


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[Assistant] You go straight to hell, the big man was wearily saying.


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[Assistant] The snow had almost stopped. It was getting colder now.


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[Assistant] The flakes were smaller now, drawing downward breathlessly like bits of white lint.


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[Assistant] They clung to the soaked grass by the road and lay on the frozen mud. The boy's feet cracked the skim ice on the mud, then, in withdrawal, made a sucking sound. Two hundred yards up the road he came to the place.


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[Assistant] Studying on the road, the one room-frame building stood beside a big cedar. A tin sign, obscured by rust and weather, was nailed to the door, carrying the words, Dr. A. P. Small, Office.


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[Assistant] The boy turned up the path by the cedar, whose black boughs swooped down toward the bare ground.


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[Assistant] The house was set far back from the road, half hidden by trellises to which leafless horny vine clutched and curled.


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[Assistant] The windows of the house gave blankly without reflection.


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[Assistant] On the yard where grass stuck stiffly up from dirty ice curdled pools at the roots, the door had a glass pane in it.


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[Assistant] Behind the glass a laced curtain hung like a great coarse cobweb. He tapped the paintless wood of the door. It was a woman who at last opened the door. What do you want, boy? She said. I want her to get the doctor, he said. She said, clean your feet and come in, and abruptly turned down the low hall.


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[Assistant] He scraped his shoes, stooped to wipe them with his fingers, and then, wringing the mud from his hands, wiped them on the Mackinaw.


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[Assistant] He followed her with quick secret glances from one side to the other.


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[Assistant] She was standing before a door, her thin arm pointing inward. You come in here, she ordered.


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[Assistant] He stood back from the hearth while the woman thrust her hands nervously at the blaze. She was a little woman and while she warmed her hands


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[Assistant] Looking at her little hands that approached and jerked from the bright blaze. Oh, she said.


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[Assistant] She turned fully at him, inspected him sharply from head to foot.


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[Assistant] You ought to take off your hat when you come in the house, boy, she said.


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[Assistant] He took the big hat off his head and standing before held it tight in both hands. She nodded at him, said, wait a minute, and was going out the door.


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[Assistant] With a dubious inquiring step, as on suspected ice, he went across the straw matting toward the hearth and put his back to the fire.


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[Assistant] He looked at all the objects in the room covertly spying on them as though they had a life of their own.


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[Assistant] The guilt iron bed covered by a lace counterpane.


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[Assistant] The unpainted rocking chairs with colored pillows on the seats that were pulled up to the hearth. The table on which stood a basket full of socks, rolled up in neat balls. The fire spat and sputtered in mild sibilance, eating at the chunks of sawn wood on the hearth. And the clock,


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[Assistant] It's face supported by plump cupids of painted china, ticked with a small busy sound.


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[Assistant] The boy laid his hat on the yellow cushion of one of the chairs and put his hands to the fire. Against the plump little cushion, its color so bright, the hat was big and dirty. With hands still stretched out, the boy regarded it.


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[Assistant] It was soggy black with wet flecks of mud clinging to it At the creases it was worn through The boy took it quickly off the chair


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[Assistant] The man was buttoning up a brown overcoat that dropped to his ankles. Beneath the coat his small booted feet stuck out. The woman slipped him past him and came to the fire, put her hands toward the blaze again, jerked them back, all the while looking at the boy.


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[Assistant] The man pulled a black fur cap on his head and turned down the earflaps. Let's go, he said.


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[Assistant] The woman went up to him, touching his breast with a quick indecisive motion as when she spread her hands to the fire. Don't wait up for me, he said.


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[Assistant] He put his face down, a sharp expressionless face that seemed inconsequential under the big fur cap, and the woman kissed his cheek. Her kiss made a neat dry sound, like a click.


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[Assistant] He went into the hall, a boy following to the door of the room, where the women stood aside to let him pass. He paused for an instant at the threshold. Much obliged, he said to her, and slipped down the hall after the man like a shadow.


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[Assistant] A horse and buggy, the curtains up, stood beyond the cedar at the corner of the office.


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[Assistant] The powdery flakes of snow drifted cautiously downward, were lost in the dark branches of the tree, on the road where the horse stood, head down in patience. You get in, the man said, and went around to the driver's side. The boy climbed into the buggy, slipping under the curtain.


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[Assistant] The man got in and bent to fasten the curtain flap on his side.


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[Assistant] You fix them over there, he said, and picked up the reins.


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[Assistant] The boy fumbled with the metal catch. The man reins in hand, watching him. Don't you know nothing, son? He said. I ain't never fixed one of four, the boy said.


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[Assistant] The man took an end, jabbed it under his thigh, and wrapped it around the outside leg. Now fix yourself up over there, he ordered. He shook out the reins through the slit in the curtain.


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[Assistant] That's right, ain't it? The doctor said. We go out of the settlement this way? Yes, sir, the boy said. I thought I recollected it so. They drew past the store. A man went down the steps and started to walk up the road, walking with a plunging, unsteady stride, plowing the mud. His high shoulders hunched and swayed forward. John Graber, the doctor, jerked his mitten thumb toward the man. He better be getting on home, his woman sick like she is.


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[Assistant] He shook his head. The shark features without expression. A mighty sick woman. Kidneys, he said. Yes sir, the boy said. Gray will be cooking his own supper for long.


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[Assistant] They pass the last house, a small gray house set in the open field.


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[Assistant] A mule stood close to the barbed wire fence which separated the field from the road, and a fine flake sank in the field in the gullies.


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[Assistant] From the chimney of the house a line of smoke stood up very still amidst the descending flakes. Graber's house, the doctor said.


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[Assistant] The boy sat up straight and peered through the icing glass panels at the house in the smoke in the gutted field. Do I turn off up the creek? The doctor asked. Yes, sir.


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[Assistant] They crossed the wood bridge where the timbers creaked and rattled loosely with the turning wheels.


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[Assistant] Beneath it, the swollen water plunged between limestone rocks, sucking the yellow foam. The flakes touched the spewing foam, the water plunging with a hollow, constant sound. What's your papi doing now? the doctor said. My papi's cropping on a place for Mr. Poursim, but it ain't no good. Uh-huh, the man grunted. He looked through the icing glass in front. They had turned off the main road up the road by the creek.


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[Assistant] On one side, the limestone stuck out from the bluff side.


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[Assistant] Thin gray icicles hanging from the gray stone among the shriveled fern fronds.


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[Assistant] The creek below the dead growth of the gorge on the other side made its hollow sound. It ain't worth nothing. Can't even grow sassafras on it. Aha, the man said.


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[Assistant] We be leaving this year. We ain't gonna have no truck no more with Mr. Porson, that old son of a bitch. He ain't done nothing like he said. He ain't... That's what your papi says, the man said.


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[Assistant] My pappy says he's a goddamn sheep snitching son of a bitch.


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[Assistant] The man stared through the icing glass pane, his sharp nose and chin sticking out in front, his head wobbling with the motion of the buggy. Then he opened his mouth


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[Assistant] I reckon Jim Porson's got something to say on his side.


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[Assistant] The boy took a stolen glance at the man's face then relapsed to the motion of the buggy.


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[Assistant] Out of the red mess of the road, limestone poked, gray and slick like wet bone, streaked with red mud.


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[Assistant] The wheels surmounted the stone, jolting down beyond on the brittle mud. On the bluff side, the cedars hung.


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[Assistant] There are thick roots thrust from the rotten crevices of stone, the roots black with moss, garnished with ice, their tops cut off the light. The man reached the reins over to the boy. Hold them, he said. The boy drew his hands from under the rug and held the reins.


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[Assistant] He grasped them very tight with both hands, the knuckles chapped and tight, and peered through the icing-glass panel at the horse, the head of the horse, under the cedars, bobbed up and down.


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[Assistant] Clamping his mittens between his knees, the man rolled a cigarette.


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[Assistant] His breath, as he licked the paper, came frostily from his mouth in a thin parity of smoke. He lighted the cigarette, then, as he reached for the reins, he found the boy observing him, observing the twisted paper that hung from his lips. He did not put the tobacco sack in his pocket, but, after a moment of hesitation, held it toward the boy. Alright, he said, go on and take it. The boy shook his head, watching the sack.


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[Assistant] Ah hell, the man said, and dropped the sack on the boy's lap.


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[Assistant] The boy took the sack without assurance, adjusted the paper, poured tobacco into it.


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[Assistant] Biting the string with his teeth, big square teeth, irregularly set in the tight mouth, he pulled the sack together and dropped it.


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[Assistant] Then he lifted the paper to his lips, the tip of his tongue darted out between his lips, strangely quick from the stolid pinched face, and licked the edge of the paper. With that delicacy of motion,


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[Assistant] With the sharp grey fingers bunched like claws together to hold a bit of paper to his mouth, the boy, crouching there in the dim interior, looked at that instant like a small croon intently feeding. He took a deep drag of the smoke, the end of the cigarette shriveling with the sucking coal,


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[Assistant] And his thin chest expanded under the cloth of the machina.


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[Assistant] Balancing the sack in his mitten hand, the doctor regarded the process. The smoke drifted colorless from the boy's nostrils, which were red and flattened. You are not to do it, the doctor said, and you're just a kid like you are. I'm ten, the boy said. It's gonna stunt your growth all right.


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[Assistant] It never stunted my papi's growth none and he's been a smokin' ever since he was eight. He's big. Ain't you never seen him?


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[Assistant] The doctor looked at the lips, which puckered grayly to the twists of paper. The pale eyes set close together under the man-sized hat. The two cigarettes, the man's and the boy's, glowed indecisively in the shadow. I've seen him all right, the man said at length. He's a plenty strong son of a bitch, the boy said.


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[Assistant] Roll and jerk to the impact of rot or stone like some lifeless object in uneasy water. Down the gorge, like the sound of wind driving through woods, the creek maintained its hollow, constant plunging.


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[Assistant] I didn't know Milt Lancaster had any girl big enough to be having babies yet. The man said, he ain't. Not I knows anything about. You said your sister, didn't you?


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[Assistant] She's my sister on my ma's side. That's what she says, and that's what my ma says.


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[Assistant] The live cigarette burned almost to the very end, hung at the corner of the boy's lips, glowing fitfully and faintly with his speech.


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[Assistant] It hung there untouched by his hands which were thrust under the rug. He no longer drew the smoke in. It seemed to seep in without conscious effort on his part, drifting from his nostrils thinly with his breath. She just come up here last summer, the boy said. I never know nothing about her for that.


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[Assistant] Ma was glad to see her, I reckon. At first, I reckon.


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[Assistant] Uh-huh, the man said absently, his chart features fixed forward, apparently without attention. But Pappy weren't and he just raised holy hell for certain. She just worked round the house and never said nothing to nobody, except to me and the kids. Then Pappy got so he didn't pay her no mind to speak of. The cigarette burned close to the lip


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[Assistant] The paper untwisting so that bits of red ash slip from it and fell toward the rug.


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[Assistant] The boy withdrew one hand from beneath the rug and with thumb and forefinger pinched together, removed the cigarette. The paper had stuck to the flesh of the lip.


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[Assistant] He jerked it free, licking the place with that strange darting motion of the tongue tip.


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[Assistant] The tongue was pink and damp against the dry gray flesh of the lips. Then she up and got sick and she's gonna have a baby, he said. So that's why she's up here, the man said. The boy shook his head. I don't know, he said. She just come.


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[Assistant] In the gloom of the buggy, their bodies, one long and lax against the back of the seat, the other short and upright, jerked and swayed. The road climbed a little. The bluff wall lost its steepness, falling to heaps of detritus among boulders.


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[Assistant] No cedars showed here, only stalks of weeds and the wiry strands of vines showing on the broken surface. Then the road went down again, swinging away from the creek. There was no further sound of the water.


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[Assistant] At the foot of the slight gray the bottom spread out bare cornfields with stubble and shocks that disintegrated to the ground rail fences lapped by the leafless undergrowth


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[Assistant] Away to the left a log house stood black under bare black trees.


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[Assistant] From it the somnolent smoke ascended, twined white and grey against the grey sky. The snow had stopped.


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[Assistant] Beyond the bottoms, the knobs look cold and smoky.


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[Assistant] From them and from the defiles, fingers of mist, white to their blackness, crooked downward toward the bare land. The horizon rim, fading,


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[Assistant] The boy, almost surreptitiously, took a stick of candy from his pocket, broke off half, and stuck it between his lips. He looked at the man's sharp, expressionless profile. Then he held out the piece to him.


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[Assistant] Without a word, the man took it and stuck it between his lips, sucking it. They moved forward between the empty fields.


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[Assistant] And at our sheepcote now, by reason of his absence, there is nothing that you will feed on. But what is, come see, and in my voice most welcome shall you be.


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[Assistant] That young Swain that you saw over there a while, that little cares for buying anything.


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[Assistant] Stella, cold, cold, the coldness of hell. How they walked on the roads together.


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[Assistant] Rosa with Magda curled up between sore breasts. Magda wound up in the shawl. Sometimes Stella carried Magda, but she was jealous of Magda.


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[Assistant] Hidden away, asleep, rocked by the march, a baby, a round infant in arms. Magda took Rosa's nipple, and Rosa never stopped walking, a walking cradle. There was not enough milk. Sometimes Magda sucked air. Then she screamed. Stella was ravenous.


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[Assistant] Her knees were tumors on sticks, her elbows chicken bones. Rosa did not feel hunger. She felt light.


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[Assistant] Not there, not touching the road.


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[Assistant] No one could reach her inside the little house of the shawls' windings.


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[Assistant] But it was not Rose's bleak complexion dark like cholera. It was another kind of face altogether.


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[Assistant] Eyes blue as air, smooth feathers of hair nearly as yellow as the star, sewn into Rose's coat.


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[Assistant] You could think she was one of their babies.


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[Assistant] Dreamed of giving Magda away in one of the villages.


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[Assistant] She could leave the line for a minute and push Magda into the hands of any woman on the side of the road. But if she moved out of line, they might shoot.


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[Assistant] And even if she fled the line for half a second and pushed the shawl bundle at a stranger, would the woman take it? She might be surprised or afraid. She might drop the shawl and Magda would fall out and strike her head and die. The little round head.


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[Assistant] Sticking up in the bottom gum, how shining, an elfin tombstone of white marble gleaming there.


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[Assistant] The shawl's good flavor, milk of linen. It was a magic shawl.


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[Assistant] A peculiar smell of cinnamon and almonds lifted out of her mouth.


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[Assistant] She held her eyes open every moment, forgetting how to blink or nap, and Rosa, and sometimes Stella, studied their blueness.


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[Assistant] Partly because she was only 15 months old, and partly because the spindles of her legs could not hold up her fat belly.


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[Assistant] Rosa gave almost all her food to Magda. Stella gave nothing.


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[Assistant] She learned from Magda how to drink the taste of a finger in one's mouth. They were in a place without pity. All pity was annihilated in Rosa.


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[Assistant] Rosa knew Magda was going to die very soon. She should have been dead already.


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[Assistant] But she had been buried away deep inside the magic shawl, mistaken there for the shivering mound of roses' breasts.


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[Assistant] Rosa clung to the shawl as if it covered only herself. No one took it away from her. Magda was mute. She never cried.


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[Assistant] She slept with the weight of her thigh on Magda's body.


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[Assistant] Rosa and Stella were slowly turning into air. Magda was quiet.


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[Assistant] She watched. Sometimes she laughed. It seemed a laugh, but how could it be? Magda had never seen anyone laugh.


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[Assistant] Magda's eyes were always clear and tearless. She watched like a tiger. She guarded her shawl.


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[Assistant] No one could touch it. Only Rosa could touch it. Stella was not allowed.


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[Assistant] The shawl was Magda's own baby, her pet, her little sister. She tangled herself up in it and sucked on one of the corners when she wanted to be very still.


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[Assistant] Then Stella took the shawl away and made Magda die. Afterwards, Stella said, I was cold.


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[Assistant] Magda flopped onward with her little pencil legs scribbling this way and that in search of the shawl.


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[Assistant] The pencils faltered at the barracks opening where the light began. Roses saw and pursued.


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[Assistant] But already Magda was in the square outside the barracks, in the jolly light. It was the roll call arena.


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[Assistant] And at the same time, a fearful joy ran in Rose's two palms. Her fingers were on fire. She was astonished, febrile.


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[Assistant] Magda, in the sunlight, swaying on her pencil legs, was howling.


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[Assistant] Rosa believed that something had gone wrong with her vocal cords, with her windpipe, with a cave of her larynx. Magda was defective, without a voice. Perhaps she was deaf. There might be something amiss with her intelligence. Magda was dumb.


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[Assistant] Even the laugh that came when the ash stippled wind made a clown out of Magda's shawl was only the air blown showing of her teeth.


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[Assistant] But now Magda's mouth was spilling a long, viscous rope of clamor. Maaa!


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[Assistant] It was the first noise Magda had ever sent out from her throat since the drying up of Rose's nipples. Maaaaaaaa. Again.


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[Assistant] Scribbling on such pitiful little bent shins, Rosa saw.


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[Assistant] She saw that Magda was going to die.


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[Assistant] A tide of commands hammered in roses' nipples. Fetch. Get. Bring.


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[Assistant] But she did not know which to go after first, Magda or the shawl.


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[Assistant] If she jumped out into the arena to snatch Magda up, the howling would not stop, because Magda would still not have the shawl.


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[Assistant] But if she ran back into the barracks to find the shawl, and if she found it, and if she came after Magda holding it and shaking it, then she would get Magda back. Magda would put the shawl in her mouth and turn dumb again.


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[Assistant] Rosa entered the dark. It was easy to discover the shawl. Stella was heaped under it, asleep in her thin bones.


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[Assistant] Rosa tore the shawl free and flew. She could fly, she was only air. Into the arena, the sun heat murmured of another life of butterflies in summer. The light was placid, mellow.


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[Assistant] Sometimes the electricity inside the fence would seem to hum.


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[Assistant] The farther she was from the fence, the more clearly the voices crowded at her.


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[Assistant] The lamenting voices strummed so convincingly, so passionately, it was impossible to suspect them of being phantoms.


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[Assistant] The voices told her to hold up the shawl high.


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[Assistant] The voice is told to shake it, to whip with it, to unfurl it like a flag.


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[Assistant] Far off, very far, Magda leaned across her air-fed belly, reaching out with the rods of her arms. She was high up, elevated, riding someone's shoulder.


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[Assistant] The light tapped the helmet and sparkled it into a goblet.


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[Assistant] Below the helmet, a black body like a domino and a pair of black boots hurled themselves in the direction of the electrified fence.


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[Assistant] Ma, ah, ma, ah, ma, ah, ah, they all hum together.


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[Assistant] How far Makda was from Rosa now, across the whole square, past a dozen barracks, all the way on the other side. She was no bigger than a moth.


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[Assistant] And the moment Magda's feathered round head and her pencil legs and balloonish belly and zigzag arms splashed against the fence,


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[Assistant] The steel voices went mad in their growling, urging Rosa to run and run to the spot where Magda had fallen from her flight against the electrified fence. But of course Rosa did not obey them. She only stood, because if she ran they would shoot.


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[Assistant] And if she tried to pick up the sticks of Magda's body, they would shoot.


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[Assistant] And if she let the wolf's screech ascending now through the ladder of her skeleton break out, they would shoot. So she took Magda's shawl and filled her own mouth with it.


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[Assistant] Stuffed it in and stuffed it in until she was swallowing up the wolf's screech and tasting the cinnamon and almond depth of Magda's saliva. And Rosa drank Magda's shawl until it dried.


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[Assistant] And run through fire I will for thy sweet sake. Transparent Helena!


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[Assistant] Not content with Hermia. No, I do repent the tedious minute I with her have spent. Not Hermia!


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[Assistant] By my trot well met, come, sit, sit, and a song.


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[Assistant] Of Messaline. Sebastian was my father. Such a Sebastian was my brother too. So went he suited to his watery tomb.


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[Assistant] If nothing lets to make us happy both, but this my masculine usurped attire, do not embrace me till each circumstance of place, time, fortune do cohere and jump that I am vile, which to confirm, I bring you to a captain in this town where lie my maiden weaves, by whose gentle help I was preserved to serve this noble conch.


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[Assistant] All the occurrence of my fortune since have been between this lady and this lord.


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[Assistant] As true in soul as doth that orbit continent, the fire that severs day from night.


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[Assistant] The captain meteth Primi first on shore hath my maid's garments. He upon some action is now endurance at Malvolio's suit. A gentleman and follower of my lady's.


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[Assistant] Therefore, for God's sake, entertain good comfort and cheer His grace with quick and merry eyes.


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[Assistant] Will Your Grace persuade the Queen to send the Duke of York unto his princely brother presently? If she deny, Lord Hastings, go with him and from her jealous arms pluck him, perforce.


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[Assistant] This prince hath neither claimed it, nor deserved it, and therefore, in mine opinion, cannot have it. Then taking him from thence that is not there, he'll break no privilege, nor charter there.


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[Assistant] After I had a sanctuary men, but sanctuary children, until now.


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[Assistant] What say you, uncle? I say without character, fame lives long. That's like the formal vice, iniquity. I modernize two meanings in one word. That Julius Caesar was a famous man.


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[Assistant] And if I live until I be a man, I'll win our ancient right in France again, or die a soldier as I lived a king.


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[Assistant] There's our cousin noble lord of y'all. I thank you, gentle uncle.


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[Assistant] At Crosby Hall, there shall you find a- Nah, my lord.


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[Assistant] What shall we do if we perceive Lord Hastings will not yield to our contracts? Stop off his head. Something we will determine. And look.


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[Assistant] All the moveables whereof the king my brother was possessed. I'll claim that promise


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[Assistant] Such a gracious hand. And look to have it yielded with all kind.


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[Assistant] You may jest on, but by the holy rude I do not like these several counsels I.


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[Assistant] And supper too, although their nose did not. Tom, will you go?


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[Assistant] Your grace, we think, should soonest know his mind. We know each other's faces, but our hearts


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[Assistant] He knows no more of mine than I of yours, or I of his, my lord, than you of mine. Lord Hastings, you and he are near in love.


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[Assistant] Tomorrow in my judgment is too sudden, for I myself am not so well provided as else I would be were the day prolonged.


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[Assistant] Yet had we not determined he should die until your lordship came to see his end, which now the loving haste of these our friends, something against our meanings have prevented, because my lord,


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[Assistant] I would have had you here as a traitor, speak and timidly confess the manner and the purpose of his treasons.


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[Assistant] As if the golden fee for which I plead were for myself. And so, my lord, adieu. If you thrive well, bring them to Baynot's castle, where you shall find me well accompanied.


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[Assistant] His own bastardy as being got your father's head in France, and his resemblance being not like the duke.


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[Assistant] With all, I did infer your lineaments being the right idea of your father, both in your form and nobleness of mind.


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[Assistant] His answer was, the people were not used to be spoke to, but by the recorder. Then he was urged to tell my tale again.


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[Assistant] When he had done, some followers of mine own, at lower end of the hall, hurled up their caps, and some ten voices cried, Oh, save King Richard.


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[Assistant] And thus, I took the advantage of those few. Thanks, gentle citizens and friends, because I, this general applause and cheerful shout, argues your wisdom and your love to Richard. And even here break often came away. What tongueless blocks were they? Would they not speak? No, by my troth, my lord. Well, not the mayor then, and his brethren count.


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[Assistant] I'd be not easily won to our request. Play the maid's part, still answer nay, and take you.


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[Assistant] Return, good Tatesby, to the gracious duke. Tell him...


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[Assistant] Myself, the mayor, and all the men in deep designs, in matter of great moment, no less important than our general good, I've come to have some conference with his grace.


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[Assistant] Would it might please your grace on our entreaties to amend your fault? Else wherefore breathe I in a Christian land? No then, it is your fault.


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[Assistant] And by their vehement instigation to this just cause, come I to move your grave.


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[Assistant] Our nuptial hour draws on a pace. For happy days bring in another moon.


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[Assistant] What say you, Hermia? Be advised, fair maid. To you, your father should be as a god.


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[Assistant] And within his power to leave the figure or disfigure it, Demetrius is a worthy gentleman.


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[Assistant] Either to die the death or to abjure forever the society of men. Therefore, fair Hermia, question your desires. Know of your youth. Examine well your blood.


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[Assistant] Whether, if you yield not to your father's choice, you can endure the livery of a nun. For I, to be in shady cloister mules.


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[Assistant] To live a barren sister all your life.


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[Assistant] Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon.


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[Assistant] Thrice blessed they that master so their blood to undergo such maiden pilgrimage. But earthly are happy as the rose distilled.


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[Assistant] And that which withering on the virgin thorn grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness.


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[Assistant] Thou rememberest, since once I sat upon a promontory,


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[Assistant] Having once this juice, I'll watch Titania when she is asleep.


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[Assistant] A maker full of fateful fantasies. Take now some of it and seek through this grove.


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[Assistant] Wherever sorrow is, relief would be. If you do sorrow at my grief in love, by giving love, your sorrow and my grief were both exterminated.


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[Assistant] And so perfect is my love, and I in such a poverty of grace.


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[Assistant] That I shall think it a most plenteous crop to glean the broken ears after the man that the main harvest reaps. Loose now and then a scattered smile, and that I live upon.


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[Assistant] And he hath bought the cottage and the bones that the old carlet once was master of.


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[Assistant] Was to drive before the wind. I confess that I felt a few sensations of terror.


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[Assistant] I had no compass with me, and was so slenderly acquainted with the geography of this part of the world that the sun was of little benefit to me.


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[Assistant] I might be driven into the wide Atlantic and feel all the tortures of starvation or be swallowed up in the immeasurable waters that roared and buffeted around me. I had already been out many hours and felt the torment of a burning thirst, a prelude to my other sufferings.


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[Assistant] I looked on the heavens which were covered by clouds that flew before the wind only to be replaced by others. I looked upon the sea. It was to be my grave.


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[Assistant] Fiend, I exclaimed, your task is already fulfilled. I thought of Elizabeth.


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[Assistant] Of my father and of Clerval, all left behind, on whom the monster might satisfy his sanguinary and merciless passions.


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[Assistant] This idea plunged me into a reverie so despairing and frightful that even now, when the scene is on the point of closing before me forever, I shudder to reflect on it.


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[Assistant] Some hours passed thus, but by degrees.


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[Assistant] As the sun declined towards the horizon, the wind died away into a gentle breeze, and the sea became free from breakers. But these gave place to a heavy swell.


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[Assistant] Almost spent as I was, by fatigue and the dreadful suspense I endured for several hours, this sudden certainty of life rushed like a flood of warm joy to my heart and tears gushed from my eyes. How mutable are our feelings!


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[Assistant] I constructed another sail with a part of my dress and eagerly steered my course towards the land.


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[Assistant] It had a wild and rocky appearance, but as soon as I approached nearer I easily perceived the traces of cultivation.


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[Assistant] I saw vessels near the shore and found myself suddenly transported back to the neighborhood of civilized man.


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[Assistant] I carefully traced the windings of the land and hailed a steeple which I at length saw issuing from behind a small promontory.


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[Assistant] As I was in a state of extreme debility I resolved to sail directly towards the town as a place where I could most easily procure nourishment. Fortunately I had money with me. As I turned the promontory


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[Assistant] I perceived a small, neat town and a good harbour which I entered, my heart bounding with joy at my unexpected escape.


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[Assistant] As I was occupied in fixing the boat and arranging the sails, several people crowded towards the spot.


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[Assistant] They seemed much surprised at my appearance, but instead of offering me any assistance, whispered together with gestures that at any other time might have produced in me a slight sensation of alarm.


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[Assistant] As it was, I merely remarked that they spoke English and I therefore addressed them in that language. My good friends, said I.


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[Assistant] Will you be so kind as to tell me the name of this town and inform me where I am? You will know that soon enough, replied a man with a hoarse voice.


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[Assistant] Maybe you're come to a place that will not prove much to your taste.


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[Assistant] I was exceedingly surprised on receiving so rude an answer from a stranger and I was also disconcerted on perceiving the frowning and angry countenances of his companions. Why do you answer me so roughly? I replied.


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[Assistant] Surely it is not the custom of Englishmen to receive strangers so inhospitably? I do not know, said the man, what the custom of the English may be. But it is the custom of the Irish to hate villains. While this strange dialogue continued, I perceived the crowd rapidly increase.


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[Assistant] Their faces expressed a mixture of curiosity and anger which annoyed and in some degree alarmed me. I inquired the way to the inn, but no one replied.


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[Assistant] I then moved forward, and a murmuring sound arose from the crowd as they followed and surrounded me, when an ill-looking man approaching tapped me on the shoulder and said, "'Come, sir. You must follow me to Mr. Curwin's to give an account of yourself.' "'Who is Mr. Curwin?' "'Why am I to give an account of myself? Is not this a free country?' "'Aye, sir. Free enough for honest folks. Mr. Curwin is a magistrate.'


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[Assistant] And you were to give an account of the death of a gentleman who was found murdered here last night? This answer startled me, but I presently recovered myself. I was innocent. That could easily be proved.


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[Assistant] Accordingly I followed my conductor in silence and was led to one of the best houses in the town.


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[Assistant] I was ready to sink from fatigue and hunger, but being surrounded by a crowd, I thought it politic to rouse all my strength, that no physical debility might be construed into apprehension or conscious guilt.


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[Assistant] For it requires all my fortitude to recall the memory of the frightful events which I am about to relate in proper detail to my recollection.


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[Assistant] An old benevolent man with calm and mild manners.


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[Assistant] He looked upon me, however, with some degree of severity, and then, turning towards my conductors, he asked who appeared as witnesses on this occasion.


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[Assistant] About half a dozen men came forward and, one being selected by the magistrate, he deposed that he had been out fishing the night before with his son and brother-in-law, Daniel Nugent, when about ten o'clock


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[Assistant] It was a very dark night as the moon had not yet risen.


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[Assistant] They did not land at the harbor, but as they had been accustomed, at a creek about two miles below.


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[Assistant] He walked on first carrying a part of a fishing tackle, and his companions followed him at some distance.


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[Assistant] And by the light of their lantern they found that he had fallen on the body of a man who was to all appearance dead.


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[Assistant] Their first supposition was that it was the corpse of some person who had been drowned and was thrown on shore by the waves.


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[Assistant] But on examination they found that the clothes were not wet and even that the body was not then cold.


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[Assistant] They instantly carried it to the cottage of an old woman near the spot and endeavored but in vain to restore it to life.


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[Assistant] It appeared to be a handsome young man about 5 and 20 years of age. He had apparently been strangled.


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[Assistant] There was no sign of any violence except the black mark of fingers on his neck.


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[Assistant] The first part of this deposition did not in the least interest me, but when the mark of the fingers was mentioned, I remembered the murder of my brother and felt myself extremely agitated.


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[Assistant] My limbs trembled and a mist came over my eyes, which obliged me to lean on a chair for support.


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[Assistant] The magistrate observed me with a keen eye and of course drew an unfavorable augury from my manner.


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[Assistant] The son confirmed his father's account, but when Daniel Nugent was called, he swore positively that just before the fall of his companion, he saw a boat.


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[Assistant] And as far as he could judge by the light of a few stars, it was the same boat in which I had just landed.


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[Assistant] Another woman confirmed the account of the fisherman having brought the body into her house. It was not coal. They put it into a bed and rubbed it, and Daniel went to the town for an apothecary. But life was quite gone.


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[Assistant] Several other men were examined concerning my landing and they agreed that with the strong north wind that had arisen during the night, it was very probable that I had beaten about for many hours and had been obliged to return nearly to the same spot from which I had departed.


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[Assistant] Besides, they observed that it appeared that I had brought the body from another place, and it was likely that as I did not appear to know the shore,


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[Assistant] I might have put into the harbour, ignorant of the distance of the town of, from the place where I had deposited the corpse.


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[Assistant] Mr. Kerwin, on hearing this evidence, desired that I should be taken into the room where the body lay for internment.


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[Assistant] That it might be observed what effect the sight of it would produce upon me.


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[Assistant] This idea was probably suggested by the extreme agitation I had exhibited when the mode of the murder had been described.


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[Assistant] I was accordingly conducted by the magistrate and several other persons to the inn.


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[Assistant] I could not help being struck by the strange coincidences that had taken place during this eventful night.


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[Assistant] Knowing that I had been conversing with several persons in the island I had inhabited about the time that the body had been found.


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[Assistant] I was perfectly tranquil as to the consequences of the affair.


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[Assistant] How can I describe my sensations on beholding it? I feel yet parched with horror


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[Assistant] Nor can I reflect on that terrible moment without shuddering and agony. The examination.


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[Assistant] The presence of the magistrate and witnesses passed like a dream from my memory when I saw the lifeless form of Henry Clairvaux stretched before me.


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[Assistant] I gasped for breath, and throwing myself on the body I exclaimed, Have my murderous machinations deprived you also my dearest Henry of life?


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[Assistant] The human frame could no longer support the agonies that I endured.


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[Assistant] And I was carried out of the room in strong convulsions. A fever succeeded to this. I lay for two months on the point of death.


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[Assistant] My ravings, as I afterwards heard, were frightful. I called myself the murderer of William, of Justine, and of Clairvaux.


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[Assistant] Sometimes I entreated my attendants to assist me in the destruction of the fiend by whom I was tormented, and at others


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[Assistant] I felt the fingers of the monster already grasping my neck and screamed aloud with agony and terror.


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[Assistant] Fortunately, as I spoke my native language, Mr. Curwin alone understood me.


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[Assistant] But my gestures and bitter cries were sufficient to affright the other witnesses. Why did I not die?


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[Assistant] More miserable than man ever was before, why did I not sink into forgetfulness and rest? Death.


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[Assistant] Snatches away many blooming children, the only hopes of their doting parents.


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[Assistant] How many brides and youthful lovers have been one day in the bloom of health and hope, and the next a prey for worms and the decay of the tomb.


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[Assistant] Of what materials was I made that I could thus resist so many shocks which, like the turning of the wheel, continually renewed the torture. But I was doomed to live.


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[Assistant] And in two months found myself as a waking from a dream in a prison, stretched on a wretched bed surrounded by jailers, turnkeys, bolts, and all the miserable apparatus of a dungeon.


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[Assistant] It was morning, I remember, when I thus awoke to understanding.


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[Assistant] I had forgotten the particulars of what had happened and only felt as if some great misfortune had suddenly overwhelmed me.


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[Assistant] But when I looked around and saw the barred windows and the squalidness of the room in which I was, all flashed across my memory, and I groaned bitterly.


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[Assistant] She was a hired nurse, the wife of one of the turnkeys, and her countenance expressed all those bad qualities which often characterized that class.


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[Assistant] The lines of her face were hard and rude.


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[Assistant] Like that of persons accustomed to see without sympathizing in sights of misery. Her tone expressed her entire indifference.


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[Assistant] She addressed me in English and the voice struck me as one that I had heard during my sufferings. Are you better now, sir? said she.


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[Assistant] I am sorry that I am still alive to feel this misery and horror. For that matter, replied the old woman, if you mean about the gentleman you murdered


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[Assistant] I believe that it were better for you if you were dead. For I fancy it will go hard with you. However that's none of my business. I am sent to nurse you and get you well. I do my duty with a safe conscience. It were well if everybody did the same.


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[Assistant] I turned with loathing from the woman who could utter so unfeeling a speech to a person just saved on the very edge of death.


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[Assistant] But I felt languid and unable to reflect on all that had passed.


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[Assistant] For it never presented itself to my mind with a force of reality.


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[Assistant] As the images that floated before me became more distinct, I grew feverish. A darkness pressed around me.


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[Assistant] No one was near me who soothed me with gentle voice of love. No dear hand supported me. The physician came and prescribed medicine.


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[Assistant] And shall not myself, one of their kind, that relish all as sharply passion, as they be kindly removed from the heart?


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[Assistant] My terms I'll break, their senses I'll restore, and they shall be themselves.


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[Assistant] And when I have required some heavenly music, which even now I do, to work mine end upon their senses, that this airy charm is for, I'll break my staff.


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[Assistant] Mine eyes, even sociable to the show of thine, fall fellowly drops. The charm dissolves the place.


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[Assistant] Understanding begins to swell and the approaching tide will shortly fill the reasonable shore that now lies foul and muddy. Not one of them that yet looks on me or would know me.


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[Assistant] Sir, I invite your highness and your train to my poor cell, where you shall take your rest for this one night.


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[Assistant] Gentle breath of yours my sails must fill or else my project fails. Which was to please. Now I want faith to enforce, heart to enchant.


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[Assistant] And my ending is despair unless I be relieved by prayer which pierces so that it assaults


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[Assistant] Though where I can repeat this curse again within so small a time, my woman's heart


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[Assistant] A breeze sprang from the west and on the eleventh the passage towards the south became perfectly free.


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[Assistant] When the sailors saw this, and that their return to their native country was apparently assured, a shout of tumultuous joy broke from them, loud and long continued.


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[Assistant] Frankenstein, who was dozing, awoke and asked the cause of the tumult. They shout, I said, because they will soon return to England. Do you, then, really return? Alas, yes. I cannot withstand their demands. I cannot lead them unwillingly to danger and I must return. Do so, if you will. But I will not. You may give up your purpose.


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[Assistant] But mine is assigned to me by heaven and I dare not. I am weak.


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[Assistant] But surely the spirits who assist my vengeance will endow me with sufficient strength.


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[Assistant] But the exertion was too great for him, he fell back and fainted.


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[Assistant] It was long before he was restored and I often thought that life was entirely extinct. At length he opened his eyes, he breathed with difficulty and was unable to speak.


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[Assistant] The surgeon gave him a composing draft and ordered us to leave him undisturbed.


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[Assistant] In the meantime he told me that my friend had certainly not many hours to live. His sentence was pronounced and I could only grieve and be patient. I sat by his bed watching him. His eyes were closed and I thought he slept.


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[Assistant] My enemy and persecutor may still be in being.


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[Assistant] Think not, Walton, that in the last moments of my existence, I feel that burning hatred and ardent desire of revenge I once expressed. But I feel myself justified in desiring the death of my adversary.


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[Assistant] During these last days I have been occupied in examining my past conduct. Nor do I find it blamable.


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[Assistant] In a fit of enthusiastic madness, I created a rational creature and was bound towards him to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being. This was my duty. But there was another still paramount to that.


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[Assistant] My duties towards the beings of my own species had greater claims to my attention because they included a greater proportion of happiness or misery. Urged by this view,


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[Assistant] I refused, and I did right in refusing to create a companion for the first creature.


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[Assistant] Miserable himself that he may render no other wretched, he ought to die. The task of his destruction was mine, but I have failed.


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[Assistant] When actuated by selfish and vicious motives, I asked you to undertake my unfinished work. And I renew this request now.