Джеймс Кейн - The Moth

But I didn’t go home, anyway right away. But at last, if I was going to get anything to eat, I had to meander around to Mt. Royal. And it was in front of my aunts, at the dinner table, that my father opened up: “Mr. Parrot rang me to say you’d been in.”

“Yeah, I saw him.”

“I... took over your funds.”

“So he told me.”

“Purely as a precautionary measure.”

“Precautionary against what?”

“Further indulgences in extravagance.”

“Which indulgences are you talking about?”

“That suit you have on.”

“I like it.”

“I regard it as a waste of money.”

“I didn’t ask you how you regarded it.”

“If I’m responsible I’ll not wait to be asked.”

“And how did you get responsibility, is what I—”

But I never finished it, whatever bright remark I was about to make. Because Nancy jumped up and slammed out, saying she wouldn’t listen to such insolence, and Sheila burst out at me, wanting to know how I could dare talk like that. To her I said nothing. I didn’t regard her as bright anyhow, or think it was any of her business, so what I would be saying to her I didn’t quite know. But there was another reason too. My head was pounding by then, with a steady stab that’s always been a warning to me I’m going to blow my top. So when she stopped, for fear I might say something mean, I sat there a few seconds just looking at my plate. Then the Old Man rasped at me: “Answer her!”

“You answer her.”

“You ungrateful whelp, here I’ve embarrassed myself, gone against my inclination, all to save you from your own silly weaknesses, and—”

On the end of the table, where Nancy had been sitting, was the silver tray with the coffee service. I got up, hauled off with the foot that was to score so many football points later, and whammed that tray against the kitchen door with a crash you could hear a mile. My father jumped up and came at me. But I hadn’t forgotten what I did to Anderson. When he grabbed me by the coat collar I knocked his hand away. He ran out of the room, and when he came back he had my stick that I had parked in the umbrella stand in the hall. He began cutting at me with it, trying to beat me across the rump, while Sheila began to scream. I took a couple of whacks, to catch his cadence, and on the third I grabbed it and wheeled so I had both hands on it and twisted. He was pretty strong, a medium-size guy, but heavy-chested, with a ruddy, sunburned face. To me, even at that time, he seemed weak as a child. The stick came away in my hands. I handed it back. “Will you put it where you got it, please? I don’t like things to get mislaid.”

He set it in the corner, his face the color of firebrick, and sat down to the table again. Sheila got up sobbing and left the room. Arabella, the colored cook, came in the room and began to clean up the mess. I sat down and told her: “Arabella, would you make a little more coffee, please? I think I’d like some hot.”

That settled it, whether anyone around there could lick me or not, but it didn’t get me my money back, and it didn’t help much with the feeling I was having all the time, that I was on my own, with everyone pretty much against me. It was a long time before I came to the table. I ate in the kitchen, and used the back door to go in and out. I had no trouble, by that time, getting work. I’ve got kleptomaniac fingers, that can untie jammed shoelaces in the dark without turning on the light, and can pretty well tell, from the feel of the motor, whether it’s the distributor, pump, plugs, or what, and by that time there was hardly a garage that wouldn’t take me on whenever I wanted a job. So for a while that’s how I got my money, because my father wasn’t the kind to go soft and arbitrate.

“Will you help trim the tree, Jack?”

“... All right, Nancy, I don’t mind.”

“Is Denny in town yet?”

“Not yet he isn’t.”

“Is he spending Christmas with Miss Deets?”

“I think he is, yes.”

“Then would you and he like to go out and get a tree from Mr. Olson’s place? For us and Miss Deets?”

“I imagine that’s all right.”

It was in the kitchen, on a cold morning in December, right after Arabella had finished giving me scrapple and buckwheat cakes. So when Denny got to town, which was a couple of days later, we drifted over to the garage and Kratzer gave me the light truck and we went on out to Olson’s place for trees. Olson had a chicken farm out toward Relay, but there was a woods on it, and in return for us taking eggs off him the year round we had a standing invitation to come over and help ourselves to Christmas stuff. So pretty soon we found trees, a bunch of scrub pine on a hillock. Denny was for chopping them down, but I hate sloppy work, so we sawed them, one for Miss Deets and one for us. Then we found some holly and sawed it out. Mistletoe took us quite a while, and as nothing had been said about getting any, I was for coming home with what we had. But Denny got to laughing so hard at the idea of anybody kissing Nancy or Sheila or Miss Eunice that we had to find some, just for the hell of it. So at last, on a black walnut, we found three or four bunches. The limb it was attached to took some sawing, but when we finally got it, it looked like something. That night I stayed at Miss Deets’s for supper, but as usual he went too far, and got to imagining just what it would be like if any one of the three got a chance at what mistletoe was for, and I had to shut him up.

On Mt. Royal, when we lit the tree Christmas Eve, I had candy and handkerchiefs and stuff under it for Nancy and Sheila, and a scarf for the Old Man, so by the time the carolers got there, things were easier. Then I found a little box marked for me, with a key in it. Something inside me gave a jump, and I went to the door and looked. There at the curb was the snappiest little gray Chevvie you ever saw, and when I went out there and tried it, the key fitted and the car went. I drove it around the block and came back and went inside. Well, what do you do in a case like that? I took the Old Man’s hand and held it, and his eyes filmed over, and I had to run up to my room. I bawled until I thought the house must be shaking, and pretty soon I could feel it, he was there in the room with me. Then he wiped my eyes and we went down. I’d be a liar if I didn’t say I wasn’t so glad it hurt.

Not long after that, two or three days I guess, anyway during the holidays, he brought me in the study again, and for the first time opened up, in a fair and square way so we could talk, on the subject of my money. “To begin with, I want to explain what I did, to tell you the reason I had for doing it, of going to court without telling you, and plastering papers all over your accounts.”

“Well, what was the reason?”

“I was afraid to tell you what I intended doing.”

“I don’t know why.”

“You were under a certain influence.”

“I hadn’t seen Miss Eleanor in weeks.”

“Be that as it may, my risk, if I dallied with it, was that it would be out of my hands before a court could act at all. All you had to do was withdraw the cash, as you had a perfect right to do, and once you handed it over to somebody else, or hid it, or got it out of the state, that would end any chance I might have of taking it over for you.”

“I never even thought of anything like that.”

“So I now realize.”

“But why have you got to take it over?”

“It’s my responsibility.”

“I made the money.”

“... I’ve been over that, in my mind, a thousand times. However, the fact that by some freak chance you briefly had a singing voice, an overwhelming thing to me, I may say, if I never said it before, does not change the basic fact: It is my duty to see that you get the full benefit of this money, to make sure it is not dissipated by some youthful impulse, or extravagance, or at the suggestion of well-intending friends. I can’t evade that, and I’ll have you know, at the outset, I haven’t evaded it, regardless of how you feel about it, and I won’t. In a friendly, wholly affectionate way, it that clear?”