A Walk on the Wild Side Read Online Free PDF Page B

those cold looks told, yet not one cared a tear.
    Pressing a bandanna to his lips, Byron dismounted cautiously. His father’s cracked voice, with a dozen others as cracked, joined in a hymn familiar to all. That rose, contented in all its discords, in a chorus above all argument.
O lovely appearance of death
No sight upon earth is so fair;
Not all the gay pageants that breathe
Can with a dead body compare—
    and pursued him down every step of the street hawking bloodily all the way.
    They had come to see someone lose. That it should be the same doomed fool week after week gave a flip to their satisfaction. Saturday night after Saturday night, it was always Byron to be singled out. Between his cough, the crowd and his father, he always lost. What was it in him they had to disprove? What was it that mere repetition added?
    Byron was one whose beginnings had been more brave than most – that was what needed disproving.
    For how Fitz leaped then – literally
leaped
 – clapping his hands above his head and barking triumphantly—
‘Just as I am though tossed about
With many a conflict many a doubt
Fightings and fears within, without
O lamb of God, I come! I come!
Just as I am! Just as I am!—
    —in the name of Jesus, now come as you are!’ – and would skip down the steps, his sermon done, to take anyone’s bottle and everyone’s praise, mocking or sincere.
    ‘Keep your boots on, Preacher! Come just as you are!’
    Fitz would be weaving a bit. Yet behind his shrouded glance a gleeful victory glinted. The Lord would forgive one who had defended His ark so well.
    ‘Preacher,’ one told him, ‘you just done my heart good tonight. You plumb restored me. Next week I’m bringen the younguns, they need restorin’ too. The old woman is beyond restoren. She aint been the same since the time she got throwed by the Power.’
    ‘You never should have picked her up,’ Fitz recalled an occasion when one of his listeners had passed out – ‘You should have left her right there where Jesus flang her. How’s she feeling?’
    ‘Better, thank you kindly. We got a bit of a job for you any time you’re of a mind to run out our way.’
    That was all right with Fitz. If Protestant privies lined both sides of the road to the City of Pure Gold, by God he’d shovel his way to Salvation. But before he’d take money from papists rapists he’d go the other route. He was playing the whore to no man.
    He was a Witness for Jehovah and saw the Holy See engaged in an international conspiracy against the Anglo-Saxon race in general and the Linkhorns in particular.
    Papists Rapists! – that’s who it was who kept cheating!
     
    Dove Linkhorn could not remember a time, a place nor a single person, house cat or hound dog that had sought his affection. But sometimes in the depths of a troubled sleep he had a fleeting feeling that a woman with red-gold hair had just touched his hand and fled beyond a curtained door.
    A doorway that had not been curtained for years. The little cavern of a room was so sloping that the post of his high-ended bed touched its ceiling.
    The old-fashioned bedstead they called a ‘stid’ – ‘It were Ma’s stid ’n all the makin’s was Ma’s too’ – ‘makin’s’ being the shuck-mattress, quilt coverlet, and two square pillows of the kind still called ‘shams.’ The sham on his left bore the embroidered legend,
I slept and dreamt that life was Beauty
. The one on the right,
I woke and found that life was Duty
. As often as not Dove’s head, in sleep, fell squarely in between.
    That was just as well. Although he was sixteen he could read neither his pillow nor the sooty legend behind the stove:
CHRIST
is the head of this house
THE UNSEEN HOST
at every meal
THE SILENT LISTENER
to every conversation
    Fitz had kept him out of school by way of protesting the hiring of a Catholic principal. But no one had protested his protest. No one had come to claim the boy for the board of education. There was