What he longed most to catch sight of was—a stork. Those babies across on the fire escapes, storks had brought them (which was the main reason why all the families kept bedclothes out on the barred shelves; a quilt or a pillow made a soft place on which to leave a new baby). A stork had brought Cis—she had had her own mother's word for it many times before that mother died. A stork had brought Johnnie, too—and Grandpa, Mrs. Kukor, the Prince of Wales, the janitress; in fact, every one.
"I wonder what kind of a stork was it that fetched Big Tom!" Johnnie once had exclaimed, straightway visioning a black and forbidding bird.
Storks, according to Cis, were as bashful as they were clever, and did not come into sight if any one was watching. They were big enough to be seen easily, however, as proven by this: frequently one of them came floating down with twins!
"Down from where?" Johnnie had wanted to know, liking to have his knowledge definite.
"From their nests, silly," Cis had returned. But had been forced to confess that she did not know where storks built their nests. "In Central Park, I guess," she had added. (Central Park was as good a place as any.)
"Oh, you guess!" Johnnie had returned, disgusted.
He had never given up his watching, nor his hope of some day seeing a big baby-bringer. He searched his sky patch now. But could see only the darting sparrows and, farther away, some larger birds that wheeled gracefully above the city. Many of these were seagulls. The others were pigeons, and Cis had told him that people ate them. This fact hurt him, and he tried not to think about it, but only of their flight. He envied them their freedom in the vast milkiness, their power to penetrate it. Beyond the large birds, and surely as far away as the sun ever was, some great, puffy clouds of a blinding white were shouldering one another as they sailed northward.
Out of the wisdom possessed by one of her advanced age, Cis had told him several astonishing things about this field of sky. What Barber considered a troublesome, meddlesome, wasteful school law was, at bottom, responsible for her knowing much that was true and considerable which Johnnie held was not. And one of her unbelievable statements (this from his standpoint) was to the effect that his sky patch was constantly changing,—yes, as frequently as every minute—because the earth was steadily moving. And she had added the horrifying declaration that this movement was in the nature of a spin, so that, at night, the whole of New York City, including skyscrapers, bridges, water, streets, vehicles and population, was upside down in the air!
"Aw, it ain't so!" he cried, though Cis reminded him (and rather sternly, for her) that in doing so he was questioning a teacher who drew a magnificent salary for spreading just such statements. "And if they pay her all that money, they're crazy! Don't y' know that if we was t' come upside down, the chimnies'd fall off all the buildin's? and East River'd spill?"
Cis countered with a demonstration. She filled Big Tom's lunch pail with water and whirled it, losing not a drop.