Nelson's face turns up toward the porch and he tries to explain, "Pilly have —Pilly -" But just trying to describe the injustice gives it unbearable force, and as if struck from behind he totters forward and slaps the thief's chest and receives a mild shove that makes him sit on the ground. He rolls on his stomach and spins in the grass, revolved by his own incoherent kicking. Eccles' heart seems to twist with the child's body; he knows so well the propulsive power of a wrong, the way the mind batters against it and each futile blow sucks the air emptier until it seems the whole frame of blood and bone must burst in a universe that can be such a vacuum.
"The boy's taken his truck," he tells Mrs. Springer.
"Well let him get it himself," she says. "He must learn. I can't be getting up on these legs and running outside every minute; they've been at it like that all afternoon."
"Billy." The boy looks up in surprise toward Eccles' male voice. "Give it back." Billy considers this new evidence and hesitates indeterminately. "Now, please." Convinced, Billy walks over and pedantically drops the toy on his sobbing playmate's head.
The new pain starts fresh grief in Nelson's throat, but seeing the truck on the grass beside his face chokes him. It takes him a moment to realize that the cause of his misery is removed and another moment to rein the emotion in his body. His great dry gasps as he rounds these comers seem to heave the sheet of trimmed grass and the sunshine itself. A wasp bumping persistently against the screen dips and the aluminum chair under Eccles threatens to buckle; as if the wide world is participating in Nelson's readjustment.
"I don't know why the boy is such a sissy," Mrs. Springer says. "Or maybe I do."
Her sly adding this irks Eccles. "Why?"
The liverish skin under her eyes lifts and the corners of her mouth pull down in an appraising scowl. "Well, he's like his dad: spoiled. He's been made too much of and thinks the world owes him what he wants."
"It was the other boy; Nelson only wanted what was his."
"Yes and I suppose you think with his dad it was all Janice's fault." The way she pronounces ` Janice" makes the girl seem more substantial, precious, and important than the pathetic shadow in Eccles' mind. He wonders if she's not, after all, right: if he hasn't gone over to the other side.
"Nó I don't," he says. "I think his behavior has no justification. This isn't to say, though, that his behavior doesn't have reasons, reasons that in part your daughter could have controlled. With my Church, I believe that we are all responsible beings, responsible for ourselves and for each other." The words, so well turned—out, taste chalky in his mouth. He wishes she'd offer him something to drink. Spring is turning warm.
The old gypsy sees his uncertainty. "Well that's easy to say," she says. "It's not so easy maybe to take such a view if you're nine months expecting and from a respectable home and your husband's running around a few miles away with some bat and everybody thinks it's the funniest thing since I don't know what." The word "bat" darts into the air like one, quick and black.
"Nobody thinks it's funny, Mrs. Springer."
"You don't hear the talk I do. You don't see the smiles. Why, one woman as good as said to me the other day if she can't keep him she has no right to him. She had the gall to grin right in my face. I could have strangled her. I said to her, `A man has duty too. It isn't all one way.' It's women like her give men the ideas they have, that the world's just here for their pleasure. From the way you act you half—believe it too. Well if the world is going to be full of Harry Angstroms how much longer do you think they'll need your church?"
She has sat up and her dark eyes are lacquered by tears that do not fall. Her voice has risen in pitch and abrades Eccles' face like a file; he feels covered with cuts. Her talk of the smiling gossip encircling this affair has surrounded him with a dreadful reality, like the reality of those hundred faces when on Sunday mornings at 11:30 he mounts the pulpit and the text flies from his mind and his notes dissolve into nonsense. He fumbles through his memory and manages to bring out, "I feel Harry is in some respects a special case."
"The only thing special about him is he doesn't care who he hurts or how much. Now I mean no offense, Reverend Eccles, and I'm sure you've done your best considering how busy you are, but to be honest I wish that first night I had called the police like I wanted to."
He seems to hear that she is going to call the police to arrest him. Why not? With his white collar he forges God's name on every word he speaks. He steals belief from the children he is supposed to be teaching. He murders faith in the minds of any who really listen to his babble. He commits fraud with every schooled cadence of the service, mouthing Our Father when his heart knows the real father he is trying to please, has been trying to please all his life, the God who smokes cigars. He asks her, "What can the police do?"
"Well I don't know but more than play golf I expect."
"I'm quite sure he will come back."
"You've been saying that for two months."
"I still believe it." But he doesn't, he doesn't believe anything. There is silence while Mrs. Springer seems to read this fact in his face.
"Could you" – her voice is changed; it beseeches – "bring me over that stool there in the corner? I have to get my legs up."
When he blinks, his eyelids scratch. He rouses from his daze and gets the stool and takes it to her. Her broad shins in their green childlike socks lift meekly, and as he places the stool under the heels, his bending, with its echo of religious—pamphlet paintings of Christ washing the feet ofbeggars, fits his body to receive a new flow of force. He straightens up and towers above her. She plucks at her skirt at the knees, tugging it down.
"Thank you," she says. "That's a real relief for me."
"I'm afraid it's the only sort of relief I've given you," he confesses with a simplicity that he finds, and mocks himself for finding, admirable.
"Ah," she sighs. "There's not much anybody can do I guess."
"No, there are things to do. Perhaps you're right about the police. Or at least a lawyer."
"Fred's against it."
"Mr. Springer has good reasons. I don't mean merely business reasons. All the law can extract from Harry is financial support; and I don't think, in this case, that money is really the point. In fact I'm not sure money is ever really the point."
"That's easy to say if you've always had enough." He doesn't mind. It seems to slip from her automatically, with less malice than lassitude; he is certain she wants to listen.
"That may be. I don't know. But at any rate my concern everyone's concern for that matter, I'm sure – is with the general health of the situation. And if there's to be a true healing, it must be Harry and Janice who act. Really, no matter how much we want to help, no matter how much we try to do on the fringes, we're outside." In imitation of his father he has clasped his hands behind him and turned his back on his auditor; through the screen he watches the one other who, perhaps, is not outside, Nelson, lead the Fosnacht boy across the lawn in pursuit of a neighbor's dog. Nelson's laughter spills from his head as his clumsy tottering steps jar his body. The dog is old, reddish, small, and slow; the Fosnacht boy is puzzled yet pleased by his friend's cry of "Lion! Lion!" It interests Eccles to see that under conditions of peace Angstrom's boy leads the other. The green air seen through the muzzy screen seems to vibrate with Nelson's noise. Eccles feels the situation: this constant translucent outpour of selfless excitement must naturally now and then dam in the duller boy's narrower passages and produce a sullen backflow, a stubborn bullying act. He pities Nelson, who will be stranded in innocent surprise many times before he locates in himself the source of this strange reverse tide. It seems to Eccles that he himselfwas this way as a boy, always giving and giving and always being suddenly swamped. The old dog's tail wags as the boys approach. It stops wagging and droops in an uncertain wary arc when they surround it like hunters, crowing. Nelson reaches out and beats the dog's back with both hands. Eccles wants to shout; the dog might bite; he can't bear to watch.