Things as They Are Read Online Free PDF Page A

me. “I make mistakes,” he confessed in a thick mutter. “Sometimes I’m not sure who I am. I ain’t smart and I ain’t rich. But I am big. Wasn’t I the biggest thing in the street today? Nobody’s bigger than King Walsh. Am I right or am I wrong?”
    I said he was right. It was one o’clock in the morning and I had a headache.
    King called. Myra had parked the car outside Putt ’N’ Fun Town the other day and spied him going in there. Sonny got hot to trot, laid down an ultimatum. “Act your age. Shape up or ship out,” he told King. I think King’s the shape he is and it’s too late to change him. I don’t know how this is going to end.
    Nobody in the city knows King. He is not used to streets so long and wide. He’s an old man and we old men grow smaller, not bigger, before we die. King prefers a street he can fill, a narrow little street where he can look out over the roofs into the distance to an admiring woman calling and waving to him. He’s running after the life he had. So toll that bell in the steeple, King. Ring it, brother, make a big noise. We’re all of us going to be quiet a long, long time.

Man on Horseback

 
    FOLLOWING HIS FATHER’S DEATH , Joseph Kelsey discovered, in his bereavement, a passion for horses. Joseph’s passion for horses was not of the same character as the old man’s had been; Joseph’s was searching, secretive, concerned with lore, confined to books. It was not love. When his wife asked him what he was doing, staying up so late night after night, he said he was working on an article. Joseph was a professor of history.
    The article was a lie. He was reading about horses.

    A good horse sholde have three propyrtees of a man, three of a woman, three of a foxe, three of a hare, and three of an asse
.

    Joseph was born in a poor, backward town to a couple reckoned to be one of the poorest and most backward. It was a world of outhouses, chicken coops in backyards, eyeglasses purchased from Woolworth’s, bad teeth that never got fixed. On the afternoon of October 29, 1949, when his mother’s water broke his father ran down the lane to get Pepper Carmichael to drive them to the hospital. Rupert Kelsey didn’t ownan automobile, not even a rusted collection of rattles like Pepper’s.
    What Rupert Kelsey owned was seven horses. Horses slipped and slid through his fingers like quicksilver. When he was flush he bought more, when funds ran low he sold off one or two. Horses came and horses went in a continual parade, bays and sorrels, blacks and greys, chestnuts and roans, pintos and piebalds. His wife was jealous of them.
    There was trouble with Joseph’s birth right from the start. The hospital, staffed mostly by nuns, was tiny and antiquated, as backward as the town. Rupert Kelsey sat in the waiting room for an hour, and then a sister came out and told him they had telephoned everywhere but the doctor couldn’t be found. It was understood what that meant. The doctor was either drunk – not an uncommon occurrence – or was off playing poker somewhere without having left a number where he could be reached. Rupert nodded solemnly and the nun left, face as starchy as her wimple.
    The duty nurse behind the reception desk, a gossip, watched him closely, intrigued to see how he would take the news. He could sense her curiosity clear across the room and he was careful not to give away anything he was feeling. He had a country boy’s wilful, adamant sense of what was private, the conviction that people in towns had no notion of what was their business and what wasn’t.
    Because this was his wife’s first baby he knew that labour would likely be prolonged and hard. For three hours he sat, alternately studying the scuffed toes of his boots and the clock on the wall, his face held gravely polite against the duty nurse’s inspection. The nurse was working a double shift because the woman who was to relieve her had called in at the last minute sick. She was bored and Rupert