The Road Through the Wall by Shirley Jackson

Author:Shirley Jackson [Jackson, Shirley]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Horror, Classics
ISBN: 9780445031289
Google: qGBqzRzg2gwC
Amazon: 044503128X
Barnesnoble: 044503128X
Goodreads: 131190
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1948-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

It was dreadful; they moved in during a hot morning and everyone was there. Harriet Merriam and Marilyn Perlman walked arm in arm up and down the block, pretending not to watch; Virginia Donald, who associated pointedly with Mary Byrne of late, sat with Mary on the Byrnes’ front lawn, and they giggled; most of the boys played a haphazard baseball game in the street, far enough away to be out of the way of the moving van—if you could call it that—close enough to see everything. Tod, alone, came near in order to say “Hello” to the driver, and got a glare and a “Get away from there, kid,” for his pains. Everyone was careful to seem unaware of the whole thing; until it had been assimilated and talked over with parents and finally decided upon in neighborhood grapevine conclave, no one dared say anything definite, even smile too broadly. It might be acceptable, after all.

The moving van was a truck, with open slatted sides and furniture heaped on it, not stowed carefully inside, as Pepper Street furniture tended to be in transit, but piled, as though careless people had gone through a previous home room by room, carrying out the furniture as they came to it, throwing it into the truck, and going back for more. Besides the driver, who sat sullenly in the front of the truck without moving, there was only a thin uneasy young man to help the girl who was carrying in most of the furniture. She was perhaps no older than Harriet or Virginia or Marilyn or Mary, she was certainly no taller than Art Roberts, she was busy and worried and seemed not to know that she was being watched by eyes her own age.

“Please try to hurry,” she said once to the thin young man. “They’ll be here soon.”

The young man growled something, and the girl stopped for a minute and looked at him and then shrugged and went on tugging a table up the steps. She was not strong, apparently, but she was nearly as strong as the young man, and the furniture seemed to be mostly lightweight wicker chairs and tables; the beds were cots which came up in one folded piece, and such things as lamps and dressers and desks and bookcases seemed not to be there at all. All the furniture that went into the house-for-rent came out of the small truck, and most of it the girl carried in alone. Much of it was in bundles, apparently of clothes or tablecloths or curtains or tapestries, tied roughly together, which the girl hauled along the sidewalk, dragging dirt with them.

When all the furniture was out of the truck and inside the house, the driver got heavily down from the cab of the truck, and he and the young man stood on the sidewalk talking with the girl. They argued, the driver waved his big arms, and the young man stamped his foot, and the girl looked from one of them to the other, and finally, her shoulders tired, counted her money out to them.

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