Read Other Voices, Other Rooms for Free Online

down on them with dreamy detachment. He had a funny derby hat perched rakishly on his head, and in the candy-striped ribbon-band was jabbed a speckled turkey feather.
    Romeo stood hesitantly waiting, as if expecting Joel to take the lead; but when the white child kept still, he said: “You lucky you come to town, Mister Fever. This here little gentman’s Skully kin, and he going out to the Landing for to live.”
    “I’m Mister Sansom’s son,” said Joel, though suddenly, gazing up at the dark and fragile face, this didn’t seem to mean much. Mr Sansom. And who was he? A nothing, a nobody. A name that did not appear even to have particular significance for the old man whose sunken, blind-looking eyes studied him without expression.
    Then Jesus Fever raised the derby a respectful inch. “Say I should find him here: Miss Amy say,” he whispered hoarsely. His face was like a black withered apple, and almost destroyed; his polished forehead shone as though a purple light gleamed under the skin; his sickle-curved posture made him look as though his back were broken: a sad little brokeback dwarf crippled with age. Yet, and this impressed Joel’s imagination, there was a touch of the wizard in his yellow, spotted eyes: it was a tricky quality that suggested, well, magic and things read in books. “I here yestiday, day fore, cause Miss Amy, she say wait,” and he trembled under the impact of a deep breath. “Now I can’t talk no whole lot: ain’t got the strenth. So up, child. Gettin towards night, and night’s misery on my bones.”
    “Right with you, Mister Jesus,” said Joel without enthusiasm. Romeo gave him a boost into the wagon, and handed up the suitcase. It was an old wagon, wobbly and rather like an oversized peddler’s cart; the floor was strewn with dry cornhusks and croquer sacks which smelled sweetly sour.
    “Git, John Brown,” urged Jesus Fever, gently slapping the reins against a tan mule’s back. “Lift them feet, John Brown, lift them feet. . . .”
    Slowly the wagon pulled from the lot and groaned up a path onto the road. Romeo ran ahead, gave the mule’s rump a mighty whack and darted off; Joel felt a quick impulse to call him back, for it came to him all at once that he did not want to reach Skully’s Landing alone. But there was nothing to be done about it now. Out in front of the stable the bearded drunk had quit dancing, and the hound dog was squatting under the water trough scratching fleas. The wagon’s rickety wheels made dust clouds that hung in the green air like powdered bronze. A bend in the road: Noon City was gone.
    It was night, and the wagon crept over an abandoned country road where the wheels ground softly through deep fine sand, muting John Brown’s forlorn hoofclops. Jesus Fever had so far spoken only twice, each time to threaten the mule with some outlandish torture: he was going to skin him raw or split his head with an axe, possibly both. Finally he’d given up and, still hunched upright on the seatplank, fallen asleep. “Much further?” Joel asked once, and there was no answer. The reins lay limply entwined round the old man’s wrists, but the mule skillfully guided the wagon unaided.
    Relaxed as a rag doll, Joel was stretched on a croquer-sack mattress, his legs dangling over the wagon’s end. A vine-like latticework of stars frosted the southern sky, and with his eyes he interlinked these spangled vines till he could trace many ice-white resemblances: a steeple, fantastic flowers, a springing cat, the outline of a human head, and other curious designs like those made by snowflakes. There was a vivid, slightly red three-quarter moon; the evening wind eerily stirred shawls of Spanish moss which draped the branches of passing trees. Here and there in the mellow dark fireflies signaled one another as though messaging in code. He listened contented and untroubled to the remote, singing-saw noise of night insects.
    Then presently the music of a childish duet came