Dark Stain Read Online Free PDF

good luck. There was one over Sam’s door. He inserted his key in the lock.
    His family, his father, his mother, his older sister Rose, even his kid brother Mike, were waiting up for him. They crowded into the foyer from the living-room as he entered. Their voices, the intense eager voices of people with a hundred questions to ask, clapped against his ears. “Sam, my boy,” his mother cried at him. She clasped Sam in her arms, her brown eyes moist with tears. “Are you all right?”
    “I’m all right, mom. Don’t worry.”
    “Thank God. It must be terrible. Terrible. All the time the telephone’s ringing and all your friends they have to know. In all the papers — read the papers, I tell them. For shame to bother Sam at such a time.” She examined his face, wailed. “Sam, your jaw’s all broken.”
    “No, it isn’t. It’s a little swollen, mom.” Gently, he pushed her away. She looked strange to him, a heavy woman with flabby arms and a face grey as her hair. “I feel bad, mom. But it’s not the jaw.” He heard his voice and it sounded flat and false. His father was waving a newspaper. Lean and grey as his mother was fat and grey, his father cursed.
    “You got nothing to worry about, Sam. Feel bad for what? Such things happen in life, my son. It happens to you, to anybody. Another black lunatic, the lousy nigger. Wanted to kill you. And you feel bad. The lousy nigger choleria. It says so in the paper.”
    His mother had again folded Sam to her as if he were a little boy in need of her protection. Enveloped in her arms, Sam didn’t recognize his father’s angry face, the twisted lips, the gold teeth gleaming like fangs.
    “That’s what it gets you,” his father yelled. “Sticking up for them like you done, the lousy niggers. Oil and water. That’s how it is, my son. Now you know better. The papers all — How you try not to shoot. So the niggers, you they want to, to lynch. You. Now you know better. You see who is right. Your foolish old father.” He flaunted the newspaper at his son like a white flag.
    Sam gazed at his father. Behind the fuming old man, his kid brother was hopping up and down; his sister Rose nodded at him and wiped her eyes. Father, mother, brother, sister, he stared at them. My family, he thought chokingly and resentfully. They didn’t understand how he felt and they never would. Mike squeezed between his father and the foyer wall, scuttling around his mother’s hips over to Sam. “Gee, Sam, you killed’m,” Mike said. “Where’d you hit the boogy? Gee, lemme see your gat. I’d like to hold it a minnit.” The flats of his feet were on the floor but his body was shaking; he was a small boy of twelve with a peanut face and big man-sized ears. “Where’d you hit’m, Sam? Lemme see your gat. Lemme hold it a minnit.”
    “You go to bed,” Sam’s father whipped his paper down on Mike’s head.
    “Let Mikey alone,” Sam’s mother cried. “Why blame him he’s so excited like all of us — his own big brother — Such a thing to happen to our own son. I can’t belief it, Sam, but all the time the telephone rings. News like that, God protect us, is quicker than light. You didn’t get stabbed, Sam. Not even a lil bit somewheres. What foolishness. Hitler should be stabbed, not you.”
    “I’m all right,” Sam said. “I’m all right, all of you.”
    “I thank you, God, for bringing our boy home to us,” Mrs. Miller prayed in Yiddish, her face lifting towards the ceiling as if speaking directly to God in the apartment above.
    “All will be well yet,” Sam’s father announced piously.
    “I’m glad you’re okay.” Rose dabbed at her reddened nose.
    “Stop your blubbering, Rose,” Sam said. “Can’t you see I’m okay?” He glanced at her and saw a tall slender girl in a blue dress. She was almost as tall as himself with brown eyes like his own and she wore executive-type rimless glasses.
    “I can’t help my feelings,” she said. “That’s how I feel.