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tortured man, all to no avail. Euclid’s fits were occasions of nature which must, of necessity, blow themselves out.
    Another hour might find him reclining tranquilly beneath the shaggy old walnut tree, lost in a private vista of such compelling intricacy it was useless to disturb him; he wouldn’t answer, he would not be moved.
    But when properly tenanted in his body, Euclid was as sociable a companion as one could hope to encounter in this flinty world. Often he accompanied Liberty on rambling walks through the woods and up into the craggy hills. It was he who instructed the boy in the multitudinous guises in which shy nature routinely sought to veil herself. He knew the names of trees, the uses of plants, the tracks of animals. He showed Liberty how to map the stars and how such a map could help guide one’s wanderings upon the planet. And he introduced him to those measureless parts of the universe lurking malevolently in the pitchy places between the lights.
    One large, brightly spangled, transparent morning, the boy of an age when budding curiosity breaks out in irrepressible interrogation, he asked Euclid about his eye. The man was seated comfortably on the back porch shucking a pile of peas into a bucket between his feet, the pods splitting neatly open beneath his broad thumbs like emerald wallets, the peas tumbling into the bucket as noisily as balls of shot. When he didn’t answer, Liberty repeated the question. Without a word, Euclid rose to his feet, took Liberty by the hand and led him down the back stairs into his dwelling below the earth. One room for one man, it contained one each of the barest essentials—cot, chair, washstand, pitcher, trunk—and nailed to the wall the sole nonfunctional adornment, a crude woodcut torn from one of Aunt Aroline’s reformist magazines, depicting an enraged husband and father about to hurl a stool at his cowering wife and children, this pleasant domestic scene entitled
The Evils of Drink.
    Euclid lifted the boy high into the air and set him down on the cot as he would a compactly bundled parcel of feathers. Standing squarely before him, his one sound eye fastened grimly upon Liberty’s wavering gaze, he said, “Got that blasted glim same place I found this,” then pulled off his shirt and turned around. His back was a hideous cross-hatching of hard, ridged flesh, welt upon welt in random disarray, appearing much like the cameoed burrowings of some frantic creature permanently trapped beneath the exitless skin. “Touch it,” he commanded.
    Liberty refused, already gauging the distance between himself and the door.
    “Touch,” Euclid insisted, shoving his disfigured back into Liberty’s averted face.
    “I don’t want to.” Though his gaze, as if magnetized, kept returning to the dreadful scars.
    Euclid reached out to seize the boy’s hand. “Can’t learn nothing of any account without feeling. Now, touch.”
    Liberty’s fingers moved tentatively over the stubborn winding weals. They felt like dead snakes.
    “That’s slavery, boy, that’s the kingdom come.”
    “Can I go now?”
    At a brief nod of Euclid’s head, Liberty raced up the stairs to the kitchen where Aunt Aroline, having scrubbed and polished the floor, was busy sweeping, with her usual meticulousness, the thick layer of white scouring sand into a great herringbone pattern through which the boy’s obliterating feet went madly scampering, avoiding a near collision with a table corner, overturning a stray parlor chair, frightening the cat into a blurred leap out the window, strewn sand and Aroline’s indignant cries in his wake, and on up to the secluded safety of his room where, bolting the door, he sat upon the bed in a vague displaced spell, thoughts all ajumble but presided over by one certain central fear: that his own delicate back might one day be set upon by the same malicious agencies that had so cruelly visited his friend, a notion sufficient to ice his body and glaze his