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drawing blood, splintering Walt’s glasses on the expensive parquet floor.
    Walt had retreated at the realization of death, but he took no backward steps on his brother’s account. Rather he stood firm throughout the onslaught, ignoring Maudie’s high yells, the blurring of his vision, the sharp, surprising taste of blood. He stood firm, and when his brother had spent his anxious fury, before his brother could turn his false tears to the papered wall, Walt slipped it in good.
    “You’re a shit, you know that, Arnold?”
    “All right, cut it, Walt.” Big P.T. standing beside Maudie on the landing. “You too, Arnold.”
    “Yessir,” Arnold said. “He just gets to me sometimes.”
    “Wipe your face, Walt. Go to your room.”
    Walt mounted the stairs, smiling at black Maudie, nodding to big P.T., moving past them in silence. When he reached his door he paused, then crept forward again until he reached the room where his mother had breathed that morning. He got inside quick enough but it took a while before he was able to travel to her side; he had to think about it first as he leaned, eyes wide, his back against the door. Finally he moved, eyes on the floor, to the bed edge. A chair was placed close alongside, so, eyes still on the floor, he sat, surprised at the sudden numbness invading his body. He looked at his mother and she looked like his mother except she was dead. Frail and dead. He was the only frail one left now. Before there had been two frail ones; now there was one. Before there had been someone to cling to; two frail ones are never as frail as one. Before there had been quiet support, and that was needed for survival in this great rough house. Walt looked at the thing on the bed (she was that, that only now, a thing, just a thing, like any other thing, useless, dreamless, without animation) and he almost thought, I love you so, but that was wasteful since you chose to leave me, but he killed the thought ruthlessly before it developed fully, so only the first part filled his mind. I love you so ... I love you so ...
    He left her when Maudie called that it was time for dinner, first washing the blood from his face before going downstairs not to eat.
    By midnight he knew he was falling asleep and he cursed himself for his weakness because he planned to stay up all night (it seemed the least you could do the day your mother died). Ten, tired and funny-looking, Walt drowsed, aware that the day had been an important day and not just because of what she had done. His awareness was sound. He did not know that he would be sent away to school now, that the tight knots of Missouri—it’s my home, Missouri’s my home—would never be quite so tight ever. He did not know that his mother’s will made him nine-tenths a millionaire, but if he had been told, the news would only have conjured up black signs on stone gates, so he might have nodded but he never would have smiled. Nor, most immediately painful, did he dream that the Whizzer was dying—no ... not you, Whizzer ... never you—but it was true.
    What was important was a simple thought that entered him forever sometime that night, a thought which later was to cause him such pain, such pain. Try as he would—and he did try, and mightily—the thought would not vacate his mind; nothing, not even medical reports which proved that the gluttonous cancer had eaten her frail body to pieces, would shake it free. It would not go. He had loved his mother, and maybe, just maybe, just possibly, if only he had been there, there , near her, near her to help fight that final onslaught—two frail ones are never as frail as one—then perhaps she wouldn’t have died.
    Ten, tired and funny-looking, Walt slept.
    P. T. Kirkaby was worth considerably less than a million dollars when he married Emily Stahr Harding, who was worth a million dollars and considerably more. But P.T. (he was that even when he was poor, and who wouldn’t be with a name like Phineas Thaxter?) had