Frenchtown Summer by Robert Cormier

Author:Robert Cormier [Cormier, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-55628-8
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 1999-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

“Arthur Colraine

has Saint Vims' dance,”

Alyrc Tournier announced.

I pictured Arthur

dancing madly, as a Gypsy violinist

blazed the air with music

near a campfire

like in the movies.

“Saint Vitus dance

is a sickness,”

Alyre explained,

indignant with his information.

In Arthur's kitchen,

I watched his mother

feeding a blue shirt

into the wringer of the washing machine,

her wrist bruised purple

from the times

she'd caught her arm in the wringer.

All Frenchtown women

wore those purple badges.

Tilting her head, she said,

“He's awake now,”

as if a secret sound

had reached her ears.

Entering the shadowed bedroom,

I saw Arthur's sunken face

as if painted on a piece of cloth,

his hands moving in the air,

wild birds flying,

his fluttering fingers

plucking at unseen harp strings.

If his hands were birds in flight,

his eyes were birds

trapped in cages,

swinging this way and that,

unable to escape,

not looking at me,

or anything else in this world.

He was no longer Arthur Colraine,

climber of trees like Tarzan,

amazing at arithmetic

in Sister Gertrude's classroom,

but a depraved stranger,

nameless,

an apparition,

and I fled the bedroom,

did not remember later

whether I said “Thank you”

to his mother.

Running down Fifth Street,

conscious of my hands,

I stopped in terror

—were they fluttering?—

had I somehow caught

that terrible affliction?

Pronounced cured at last,

Arthur Colraine

forever after

walked among us

alone and apart,

in the schoolyard,

on the sidewalks,

and one of my sins

is that I never

spoke to him

again.

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