Lightning Bug by Donald Harington

Author:Donald Harington [Harington, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780156519984
Publisher: Mariner
Published: 1970-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

SUB THREE: Seventeen Years Ago

Cry, Bug. This is a happy story, and at first glimpse your tears would seem most unwelcome, but I’ve persuaded myself that they are called for, even required. Let them flow. I’m sorry you had to wait so long before you could have a good cry, with a strong man beside you to comfort you through the deliverance.

I’ll tell you about the last time I myself shed some tears. It was during my last visit to Little Rock, a few days after that evening I had clandestinely found my way into the Records Office of the State Hospital. On foot I went out and located 2120 West Nineteenth Street, that Taft era bungalow in the shotgun style. A family of blacks is living there now, as I discovered when a large and kindly woman came out and said to me in a mild voice without any indignation, “White man, whut you standin out here fo and gawkin at my house fo and waterin yo eyes so fo?” I told her a friend of mine had lived there long ago, and asked her if I might come in for just a moment. “My house a messy wreck,” she protested, “but if it make you dry yo eyes, you jus come on in.” I went in, but it did not make me dry my eyes. I found the room which I was almost sure was the room.

You were sitting in a chair with your feet propped up on the window sill; your legs were aching painfully again and you were trying to rest them. The view through the window was of a vacant lot next door [door? no door] grown high with rampant weeds. You had counted all those weeds; had you the desire you would have given a personal name to each. Your hands were together in your lap, almost out of sight below the bulge, your fingers were stripping tiny shreds of flesh from around your fingernails.

Beyond the field of weeds rose a single large sycamore tree; you had studied the configuration of its branches endlessly and you were beginning to read the language hidden in that wild calligraphy. God or Whoever It Was had been putting up these trees as signboards, as posters, for millions of years, but nobody until now had learned how to read the script of the twisting branches. You were finding a long message there, and understanding it; without that message you could have closed your eyes and ceased to exist.

You were three weeks overdue, and Vaughn had begun to make smart remarks. “It’s just costiveness. Let’s dose her with a big gulp of prune juice and she’ll unclog.”

That man, he was needing to be spiteful. For seven months now he’d been unable to forgive you for so violently rejecting his charitable offer to screw you on the sly for mercy.

Your sister was not being much better. At first, when you were very happy to be carrying a child, she had

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