Faint piano music floated up the valley. Somewhere below a sweet soprano voice was singing “The Blue and the Gray.”
I choose to think of that night as the first time the poet-soul of my friend was disclosed to me. Yet I would have pooh-poohed poetry—then. It was stagy stuff to be recited hectically in school on Friday afternoons, beginning, “I am dying, Egypt, dying!” and the demise complete before a dozen lines had been rendered.
“Billy, do you s’pose all men when they was boys felt like you and me?”
“Aw, I guess so.”
“Wish I knew for sure, Billy.”
“What for?”
“I dunno. Maybe it’d make things easier to stand.”
II
As Nathan’s sister Edith grew older, her petulancy of mouth became more pronounced. Like most small sisters her recreational specialty was ferreting out breaches of deportment on the part of us boys and carrying dirty little tales to our parents. Johnathan and his wife indirectly encouraged this sort of thing. They thought it “cute.”
One afternoon Edith broke a barn window. She declared at once that Nathan did it. The brother’s protestations of innocence availed him nothing. He was punished on Edith’s unconfirmed say-so. Thereupon Edith discovered she held a power over Nathan. She could blackmail him into doing almost anything whim dictated by committing petty damage herself and accusing the boy as the miscreant.