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across town to meals, and through the hedge to the Winship house to do his chores, and in the evenings after he had walked back to the dim little cabin from the cousin’s house, he did his homework and then switched on Jackie Gleason or Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca or Peter Gunn. At thirteen he might have been a resigned, not unhappy man of forty.
    On the evenings that Mike joined him to sit on theedge of the swayback bed that had been Rusky’s and stare at the blue-flickering old Dumont, they had as little to say to each other as they had in the days of crawfish and Indian Cave. But their silence was not strained. Mike never felt prickly or anxious with J.W., as she did with most other people, and he did not seem as eye-avertingly deferential with her as he did with other white people. It was as if there was a bond between them that was so deep that it did not need words, though aside from that bond there was no common ken at all in either. And it was true; the bond had been—and still was—their childhood in the shadow of the dead woman and the grieving, remote man in the Pomeroy Street house, and the constant benison of Rusky. Mike alone knew that J.W.’s closed, mulish face hid a sunny, unintimidated intelligence and a naive, biddable sweetness. He alone knew that she still sometimes wept for his mother. It was two or three months after Rusky’s death before Mike learned that her father was paying for J.W.’s food, clothing, and incidental expenses. Priss Comfort told her.
    “Then why wouldn’t he let me go to her funeral?” Mike stormed. “It’s hypocritical to support J.W. and look after him and not even go to her funeral, or let me go. It’s worse than that. It’s sneaky!”
    “No, it’s not,” Priss Comfort said severely. “It’s just his way. Your father may be a lot of things, but sneaky is not one of them. You don’t begin to know what he’s like. I’d advise you to leave off calling him names until you do.”
    Mike did.

4
    P RISS C OMFORT WAS, BESIDES R USKY, THE ONLY FIXED STAR in Mike’s firmament. Priss, from the odd-looking little stone cottage down by the high school athletic field, was stimulant, refuge, and friend to Mike from her babyhood on. A massive, chestnut-haired spinster with a precise, clarion voice who taught English at Lytton High and had been a childhood friend to John Winship, Priss had been the first person at the house after the doctor when Claudia died. Thereafter she was at the Winship house several times a week until Mike was in kindergarten, and then at least once each week.
    When Mike was adjudged by Rusky old enough to cross the street, she spent a great deal of time in Priss’s book-choked, cat-infested house, where Priss read aloud to her, answered her million restless questions, and talked reasonably with her on any subject one might pursue with a normally intelligent adult. In the savagely untidy little house Mike absorbed literature, liberal politics, art, music, Priss’s own brand of fierce ethics, local history, and Lytton genealogy, along with elsewhere forbidden Coca-Colas and Nehis. Priss’s own drinks were usually ruddy with bourbon, and sometimes she fell abruptly asleep on the sofa listening toMike. This did not strike Mike as any odder than anything else about Priss, so she never thought to mention it at home. Priss filled an undefined but essential gap between Rusky and DeeDee, and she moved effortlessly into the space where John Winship might have been. She took Mike to buy clothes and have her fine, silky hair shaped and trimmed, and heard her homework and her deepest hopes, hurts, and confusions, as well as her frequent rages and frustrations. As a result, Mike dressed as eccentrically as Priss did, with a severe style and flair that no one in Lytton recognized as such, and developed an acerbic, elliptical manner of thinking and speaking.
    Priss did none of these things for DeeDee. DeeDee needed no advice on her frilled and starched clothes and