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Wrightsville
stared in hostile silence from the unkempt sidewalk of the Hill—it
had been a journey from the moon. The boy had been tight-mouthed to
keep the tears from spilling out, afraid and suspicious—too
obedient and
    too
quiet and too all-inside-himself— until, inside his uncle's
house, out of sight of those accusing eyes, he was broken down by his
Aunt Emily's embrace and gave way to his fear. Davy used to say
scornfully that he'd really wanted to stamp and kick and break things
that day, but Aunt Emily had treacherously made him cry instead by
putting her arms around him.

    Gabby
Warrum roared from the stationmaster's office: "She's on time!"

    A sizzzz! ran through the
crowd, and then the American Legion Band burst into a nervous
tootling.

    It had been forbidden to
talk about the thing that had happened. Nevertheless, Davy and Linda
sometimes braved the tabu, whispering about it through the transom
between their childhood bedrooms while Emily and Talbot Fox slumbered
in the big room down the hall. But not too often. It was too huge,
and it was too terrible—too big with big people's secrets—to
be bandied about and become commonplace and so, in time, be
forgotten. And if there were times when it might almost be forgotten,
there was always the house next door—a deserted dinginess
growing more silent by the year. Linda was scared to death of that
aging reproach. It housed great eyeless threats. And Davy would never
go near it. He avoided even looking at it.

    "Hi, Linda!"
The Wrightsville High delegation was struggling to form a hollow
square at one end of the platform. They were waving placards nailed
to broom-handles. You Made Them Remember Kunming, Davy!!!—You
Sure Laid a Mess of Eggs, You Flying Fox!!!—Wrightsville High's
Most-Likely-to-Succeed . . . And How!!! Linda smiled and waved
back.

    How Davy had loathed them,
the jeering kids. Because they had known; the whole town knew. The
kids and the shopkeepers in High Village and the Country Club crowd
and the scrubskinned farmers who drove in on Saturdays to load
up-even the hunks and canucks who worked in the Low Village mills.
Especially the shop hands of Bayard & Talbot Fox Company,
Machinists' Tools, who merely jeered the more after the Bayard &
one day vanished from the side of the factory, leaving a whitewashed
gap, like a bandage over a fresh wound. That was another part of his
native Wrightsville that Davy shunned.

    He had hated the grownups
even more than the kids, because he could jump in on the kids with
his fists or otherwise intimidate them by playing the role
Wrightsville had assigned to him—which was, simply, to be the
son of his father. There were whole years of licking kids, and being
licked. And now other kids were brandishing placards and getting
ready to give their alumnus the rackety-rax with nine locomotives,
usually reserved for football victories over Slocum High.

    "What time is it now,
Talbot?" asked Emily Fox.

    "Now Emily," said
Talbot Fox irritably. "There's still seven minutes."

    The crowd was staring
along the twin dazzle of the rails towards Wrightsville function,
three miles up the line, as if they would bend light and see beyond
curves and past culverts and woods.

    Wrightsville's 10,000-odd .
. . Other times, other scandals. That Polish family—with all
the j's and z's—they turned on the gas in their two-room warren
in Low Village and they were all found dead, the whole family—father
and mother and eight dirty children—and no one ever found out
why. The Jim Haight case involving the noble Wrights—and
    today Patricia Wright
Bradford was married to the man who had prosecuted her sister's
husband for murder and only a few, like Emmy DuPre, ever recalled it.
And Lola Wright's running off with that Major, and fat Billy Ketcham,
the insurance man, being arrested when he crossed the state line with
the youngest Graycee girl, "the bad one." The