All closed, dark and deserted, no laughter or singing, the player piano still. From the high clock tower of the old town hall the chimes spilled the half hour. Far away across the river a train whistled, rumbled over the railroad bridge, was muffled by the intervening hills, rushed dangerously upon the town screaming and clanging, swept westward, died away in a distant whisper of steam and clicking of wheels which lasted in the imagination long after the night was once more silent and deserted.
The air was cool now after the long hot day. A breeze from the river valley to the east of the town swept through the alley stirring little whirlpools of dust. The air was suddenly filled with the cool breath of rotting oak leaves, dank river odors, algæ, fish and flowing water.
He thought of a shack among the willows, a box-car home on the river bottom; his mother coming home early in the morning, lighting the fire as though she had not been gone for nearly a month. Her dancing slippers were covered with mud, her party dress torn. The big man who was his father turned in his bunk, swore at the woman, went out banging the sagging screen door.
"Look Mother," Joe whispered, "we got a new kitten while you was gone."
River smells, fishing catfish down at the narrows, sitting all night on the sandbar listening to the "tick, tick," far down underneath the water, the splash of muskrats, the little crying noises made by raccoons in the cornfield on the hill, the whip-poor-wills, and the hoarse cry of night birds following the river.
Oars dipping into the water, boats being pulled up on distant sandbars, the mosquitoes and the damp chill, the lordly battle with a sixteen pound catfish in the dark. Bad whiskey, later on a woman.
He breathed the night air wistfully. Never again a woman's arms about him. Lost, deprived, utterly alone. He was not aware of these thoughts as words. He did not think in words but in odors, colors, sounds, and a blind hatred which he could not understand. Cheated, haunted by some unknown thing, filled with sudden fear at a footfall, foolhardy in the face of actual danger. A man who could no longer call himself a man since that knife fight with a nigger in Rockford, Illinois.
He came at last to the one light burning in the alley, a dim green globe above a door (three steps down) between two walls of sweating brick.
The twenty-six legitimate saloons serving the eighteen hundred inhabitants of Brailsford Junction were closed at this hour. Only the blind pig offered solace to the Dago section men, the farm hands making a night of it in town, and Hannah Leary who had spent half her life looking up at ceilings of empty box-cars on the siding and at stars above the Brailsford Junction Cemetery.
Joe hesitated at the top of the stairs, drinking in the aroma of the place: sweat, rot-gut whiskey, women. He ran the tip of his tongue over his full, loose lips; felt in his pocket for change.