False Entry Read Online Free PDF Page B

and ran past her out of the house.
    In the yard, I reminded myself of the schoolbooks left behind in the room, but I did not go back. She did not come after me. A cardinal whistled, and other calls, still unknown to me, insinuated from bush to bush. Although it was only eight o’clock, and well on toward October, my jersey was already dark at the armpits with sweat. In the reticent, marine land I had come from, the birds were already long gone—perhaps some of them here to me. Outside the gate, the old car, heavily waxed by my uncle, sweated too, with a premarital shine. I closed the gate and went on to school.
    When I got out that afternoon, the town had a Friday hum to it; it was market day, and even the steady loungers in front of the courthouse had each his paper bundle or loaded cord bag. In the long mud alley back of the main street, the tenant farmers’ wives stood as usual at their slap-up stalls, behind strings of rabbits congealed in their own rust, limp fowl and garden greens, old gray cartons of dirt-flecked eggs. But beyond every turning now, raw orange in the late sun, lay the great Federal gash in the hills—its crater ready to rise. I remember now how, up on the main street, a few Negroes nudged in front of the wet red slick of a new store front, saying, “Chain store, man, chain store from the North,” and how two of their women, urged from behind, walked in; how, up ahead, some of the white mill hands coming off shift hunkered up at Semple’s new sign, lit ghoulish in the daylight, the town’s first scribble of neon blue.
    “Heavy traffic, hear tell, over to Charlotte,” one muttered, and half hearing, I knew he spoke of the government hiring hall across the dam site at Charlotte, empty at first, although the rates were higher than the mill, because they were also equal for white and colored alike, but filling slowly in recent weeks, now that it was pretty certain not a nigger dared show. And looking back, I see how change comes without guns, in the sudden crater in the farmland, the silent tribune without flags in the real-estate office, the tinkle on the bourses of small towns. Years later, the historian tells himself that had he been there he would have smelled its powder. It is not so, either for a civilization or a man. The chronicler and the chronicle can never meet. But a man is both; twinned by memory, he goes on trying.
    So, late downbeat always after the measure, we follow ourselves; I follow the boy who was I. I walked on down the street, slouching along in the pure cone of my own trouble, never smelling the hint that was already in the air for the town and for me—the hint of sulphur that steals up before the first tremor in the streets.
    Back there in front of Semple’s, craning above the shoulders of the millhands, I had caught a glimpse of Johnny’s blond head above the counter, helping Semple with trade. On Fridays he had to stay until nine. I lingered on a corner, the thought of the empty house dropping down, a tear-shaped blob of solder, inside me. To the right, in what had once been the old center of town before the mill came, a few antebellum houses, most of them flats now, huddled behind their columned porticos like thumb-soiled Parthenons from a schoolboy’s primer, sunken cobbles between them and the waterless, carved stone horse troughs that had sunk too, in gradual burial rite, almost to the ground. The Pridden place, painted an accusing white by the state funds from Montgomery, stood among them.
    I tried the door and found it locked, but I had permission for another entry, a narrow, wisteria-hidden jalousie that folded sideways and gave on to the back hall. As I parted the roped branches, slid the shutters back, and entered, I stood still for a minute, flooded with a sudden peculiar comfort. For a moment, standing there in the flattery of secret privilege, I was washed inward, past some gate, inside. I was to have other such moments in my life, involuntary shudders of