right through the faces in the ring of people she approached and cut across, each step a swift kick so that her hissing sandals just skimmed the surface of the ground, she headed for the Manor house. When she had passed under the great roofed gate at the entrance with the boy, who was now the only one following her, she halted at the base of the giant black pine where the paths to the main house and the storehouse divided. Then, as if only now she had become aware of his existence, although he had made no effort to muffle his footsteps as he followed her all this way, she wheeled around in the dusk as though startled and stared down at him with her flashing eyes. And in unfamiliar accents entirely unlike those of the valley she snapped,
____Don’t think
a certain party
(it was the first time his mother used the phrase) hiding in the storehouse has any right to these ashes; they haven’t come back to him!
Without another word his mother hurried toward the main house once again, and as he dug in his heels against the pull of her small back that seemed to have dwindled swiftly, resisting with a force of his own sufficient to shred the thousands of leaves on the black pine, he shoutedsomething altogether unexpected, in a manner that communicated his outrage at having been ignored by his mother all this time,
____
I don’t have no traitor’s blood in my veins! You can take the ashes of that coward and throw them in the feed trough, yessir! Now I’m going into the storehouse too, and forget all about them ashes! Because I don’t have no traitor’s blood in my veins!
His mother, though she disdained to answer these shouted words, did look around for just an instant and toss her head at him, but he turned his back on the white, dry paper of her face that appeared to flutter and dance through the gelatin filter of his tears and the dusk, and pulling his
fake
helmet down over his ears just as she described it when she ridiculed him, the figure of a valley brat in his shirt woven from hemp and his old trousers tied around his legs like knickerbockers, he headed alone for the storehouse. The bayonet strapped to his hip with a hemp cord, his grandfather’s in the Russo-Japanese war which early that morning, just after his mother had set out in her black kimono, he had hunted up in the barn and cleaned of rust himself, reassured him as he walked along.
[[In my child’s way I sensed that people from the outside might try to destroy the
Happy Days
in the storehouse that were about to begin for me and
a certain party
and no one else, and if they did appear I intended to fight fearlessly with that old bayonet which had been used for cutting fodder and was like a pitch-black iron bar, “he” says. You seem to have had a marvelous time in that storehouse, was your father glad to have you there from the beginning? Certainly not, I didn’t even try to talk to him. There was a naked bulb hanging from the lintel at the entrance, wrapped in a black cloth as a precaution against air raids, and when I turned it on and steppedinside, where it was pitch dark,
a certain party
was wearing the underwater goggles with cellophane covering the lenses that I have now (he had originally prepared them to observe a solar eclipse in Manchuria) and staring into the back of the storehouse, I suppose he had already resolved to prevent anyone from reading his expression ever. All around the mechanical barber’s chair he was sitting in there were piles of big books in a foreign language. They were probably books about agriculture. According to the military journals I read later, he had plans to bring his “comrades” back to the land in the valley and to have the skirts of the forest cleared for cultivation. But by the time I joined him in the storehouse he must have lost his will to read those books, otherwise he wouldn’t have kept the goggles on day and night. With these goggles on I don’t imagine he could distinguish a single object in that
____Don’t think
a certain party
(it was the first time his mother used the phrase) hiding in the storehouse has any right to these ashes; they haven’t come back to him!
Without another word his mother hurried toward the main house once again, and as he dug in his heels against the pull of her small back that seemed to have dwindled swiftly, resisting with a force of his own sufficient to shred the thousands of leaves on the black pine, he shoutedsomething altogether unexpected, in a manner that communicated his outrage at having been ignored by his mother all this time,
____
I don’t have no traitor’s blood in my veins! You can take the ashes of that coward and throw them in the feed trough, yessir! Now I’m going into the storehouse too, and forget all about them ashes! Because I don’t have no traitor’s blood in my veins!
His mother, though she disdained to answer these shouted words, did look around for just an instant and toss her head at him, but he turned his back on the white, dry paper of her face that appeared to flutter and dance through the gelatin filter of his tears and the dusk, and pulling his
fake
helmet down over his ears just as she described it when she ridiculed him, the figure of a valley brat in his shirt woven from hemp and his old trousers tied around his legs like knickerbockers, he headed alone for the storehouse. The bayonet strapped to his hip with a hemp cord, his grandfather’s in the Russo-Japanese war which early that morning, just after his mother had set out in her black kimono, he had hunted up in the barn and cleaned of rust himself, reassured him as he walked along.
[[In my child’s way I sensed that people from the outside might try to destroy the
Happy Days
in the storehouse that were about to begin for me and
a certain party
and no one else, and if they did appear I intended to fight fearlessly with that old bayonet which had been used for cutting fodder and was like a pitch-black iron bar, “he” says. You seem to have had a marvelous time in that storehouse, was your father glad to have you there from the beginning? Certainly not, I didn’t even try to talk to him. There was a naked bulb hanging from the lintel at the entrance, wrapped in a black cloth as a precaution against air raids, and when I turned it on and steppedinside, where it was pitch dark,
a certain party
was wearing the underwater goggles with cellophane covering the lenses that I have now (he had originally prepared them to observe a solar eclipse in Manchuria) and staring into the back of the storehouse, I suppose he had already resolved to prevent anyone from reading his expression ever. All around the mechanical barber’s chair he was sitting in there were piles of big books in a foreign language. They were probably books about agriculture. According to the military journals I read later, he had plans to bring his “comrades” back to the land in the valley and to have the skirts of the forest cleared for cultivation. But by the time I joined him in the storehouse he must have lost his will to read those books, otherwise he wouldn’t have kept the goggles on day and night. With these goggles on I don’t imagine he could distinguish a single object in that
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