"Come, Water Spout, come play wit' mama!" Somewhere, in the frowsy dark, she had seized a toy, a symbol of Miss Esteena's charity at Yuletide, and shaking it gave it to him.
Glazed-eyed, he reluctantly took it; he made no effort to wring joy and sound out of it.
As he grew older, she saw to it that he wasn't left by himself on the bed; not that she minded his wetting it, so that when she came home at night she had to take refuge on the floor, if she wished a dry spot to lie on. But time was slowly proving that there was life awake and raging in his glazed little body, which all along had seemed to her to lack virility. And he would, by the wreckage he'd leave behind, play, dance, and roll—make noise!—in a fury of possession, with some jaunty toy wagon or cart horse she had given him to play with. No, it didn't pay to leave him up there on the bed. He might fall to the unkempt floor. Then, again, although he refused to cry, no matter how often or how hard he would fall, in some quiet, unobtrusive way, the idea began to enter Seenie's head that he might not do so well, after all, from all these constant falls and things. His refusal, his failure to cry, started in her queer trains of thought.
At first they excited a more unobservant severity.
"Yo' too stubborn, sah, yo' too mannish—look at he dough—he look lik' something dog no like."
"Yo' so little an' yo' so ownwayish," she'd say to him, "yo' won't cry, ni, yo' won't cry—well, Oi gwine show yo' somet'ing," and she'd beat him for fair.
All this, when, turning away his little head, he'd try to shove the spoon with the fluff of corn mash away from him; or after a bowl of cane juice, when, with only the warning of a writhing face, he would unbosom himself, abdominally speaking.
And then Seenie, with the instinct of a heifer, began to argue that after all there must be something wrong with Water Spout, with any child, as lavishly fed as he was, who didn't stamp and yell and knock things out of one's hands and dribble at the mouth and lather with spit everything he came in contact with—the little heathen!
"Behave like a good lil' boy yo' heah?" she said, a bit penitently, pausing at the door. She shook a chastising finger at him. "Behave yo'self, heah, an' yo' mahmie will bring yo' a sugar plum."
Clap han' fuh mahmie
Til pahpie come
Bring sugah cake
An' giv' Seenie some!