“I don’t feel like telling one just now,” said I, the proposer of the game, and went on digging leaves out of a crevice in the rotting rail. So Mary Elizabeth serenely took up the tale where she had left it.
“One morning he looked over a high sky mountain—that’s what suns like to do best because it is so becoming—and he shone in a room of the sky where a little black star was sleeping. And he thought he would ask it what to do. So he said to it, ‘Little Black Star, where shall I be, now that I am all done and finished, nice and shiny?’ And the Little Black Star said: ‘You’re not done. What made you think you were done? Hardly anybody is ever done. I’ll tell you what to be. Be like a carriage and take all us little dark stars in, and whirl and whirl for about a million years, and make us all get bright too, and then maybe you’ll be a true sun—but not all done, even then.’ So that’s what he decided to do, and he’s up there now, only you can’t see him, because he’s so far, and our sun is so bright, and he’s whirling and whirling, and lots more like him, getting to be made.”
Delia followed Mary Elizabeth’s look into the blue.
“I don’t believe it,” said she. “The sun is biggest and the moon is next. How could there be any other sun? And it don’t whirl. It don’t even rise and set. It stands still. Miss Messmore said so.”
We looked at Mary Elizabeth, probably I alone having any impulse to defend her. And we became aware that she was quite white and trembling. In the same moment we understood that we were hearing something which we had been hearing without knowing that we heard. It was a thin, wavering strain of singing, in a man’s voice. We scrambled up, and looked over the edge of the band-stand. Coming unevenly down the broken brick walk that cut the schoolhouse grounds was Mary Elizabeth’s father. His hat was gone. It was he who was singing. He looked as he had looked that first day that I had seen him in the wood yard. We knew what was the matter. And all of us unconsciously did the cruel thing of turning and staring at Mary Elizabeth.
In a moment she was over the side of the band-stand and running to him. She took him by the hand, and we saw that she meant to lead him home. Her little figure looked very tiny beside his gaunt frame, in its loosely hanging coat. I remember how the sun was pouring over them, and over the brilliant green beyond where blackbirds were walking. I have no knowledge of what made me do it—perhaps it was merely an attitude, created by the afternoon, of standing up for Mary Elizabeth no matter what befell; or it may have been a child’s crude will to challenge things; at any rate, without myself really deciding it, I suddenly took the way that she had taken, and caught up with the two.
“Mary Elizabeth,” I meant to say, “I’m going.”
But in fact I said nothing, and only kept along beside her. She looked at me mutely, and made a motion to me to turn back. When her father took our hands and stumblingly ran with us, I heartily wished that I had turned back. But nearly all the way he went peaceably enough. Long before we reached their home across the tracks, however, I heard the six o’clock whistles blow, and pictured the wrath of the mistress of the New Family when Mary Elizabeth had not returned in time to “help with the supper.” Very likely now they would not let her stay, and this new companionship of ours would have to end. Mary Elizabeth’s home was on the extreme edge of the town, and ordinarily I was not allowed to cross the tracks. Mary Elizabeth might even move away—that had happened to some of us, and the night had descended upon such as these and we had never heard of them again: Hattie Schenck, whom I had loved with unequalled devotion, where, for example, was she? Was it, then, to be the same with Mary Elizabeth?
Her mother saw us coming. She hurried down to the gateway—the gate was detached and lying in the weeds within—and even then I was struck by the way of maternity with which she led her husband to the house. I remember her as large-featured, with the two bones of her arms sharply defined by a hollow running from wrist to elbow, and she constantly held her face as if the sun were shining in her eyes, but there was no sun shining there. And somehow, at the gate she had a way of receiving him, and of taking him with her. Hardly anything was said. The worst of it was that no one had to explain anything. Two of the little children ran away and hid. Someone dodged behind an open door. The man’s wife led him to the broken couch, and he lay down there like a little child. Standing in the doorway of that forlorn, disordered, ill-smelling room, I first dimly understood what I never have forgotten: That the man was not poor because he drank, as the village thought, but that he drank because he was poor. Instead of the horror at a drunken man which the village had laid it upon me to feel, I suddenly saw Mary Elizabeth’s father as her mother saw him when she folded her gingham apron and spread it across his shoulders and said:
“Poor lad.”