Henry Roth - Mercy of a Rude Stream - The Complete Novels

Like a riffled deck of cards, scarce seen, the compacted days of the past sped by; but now and then a pause, when a card was glimpsed: Once on the way home for lunch, he found a dollar bill on the sidewalk, so conspicuous, so verdant, he couldn’t believe everyone else had overlooked it except himself. . He pounced on it, pocketed it, and in high glee sprang over the corner hydrant no-hands — and struck his shin so cruel a blow on the iron breast of the cap protruding midway from the hydrant that ever since, superstitiously, like Pop, he braced for calamity after windfall. And again hurrying home for lunch, he hitched a ride, as he had seen so many kids do, at the rear end of a Madison Avenue trolley car; and when it went past 119th Street, fearful it would take him too far out of his way, he jumped off, couldn’t maintain his footing over the cobblestones between tracks and fell, bruising his knee so badly, a great crimson blotch glowed where his long black stocking met his knee-pants.

How Mom fumed when she spied the damage he had done: “The evil year take you! Twenty cents thrown out! New stockings! Cholera take you!”

“I still got one left,” he whined.

“Indeed. Veh, veh, veh! I nurture a dolt! Out of the miserable pittance he doles out to me, buy your shoes, your clothes, the food on the table!” Angry scarlet mounted from throat to brow. “May the sod cover you. Eat, eat. You’ll be late for school. Oy, gevald! ” She stripped his stocking down. “Unbutton your shoe. What an oaf is capable of. Only look at that!” She soaked a cloth under the faucet, wrung it out. “You could have been killed.”

“I didn’t mean it,” he wept. “I tried to get home fast.”

“Fest,” she repeated the English word while he winced under the pressure of the wet cloth. “ Sollst mir fest gehen in d’red! ”

The school janitor slapped him for posturing on a bench in the indoor playground — lunch room, something the other kids did hundreds of times, but always Ira seemed more conspicuous, more provocative. The shop teacher slapped him on the ear, but so hard that it rang all afternoon and still rang that evening when Pop came home from work. Mom reported it, and to Ira’s surprise, Pop wrote an indignant postcard to the principal, Mr. O’Reilly. What he wrote, Ira never knew, but it had its effect on Mr. Ewin, the shop teacher, because he came up to Ira, deprecating and smiling, jollied Ira about the incident. That time only one of his ears rang — Ira couldn’t help snicker at his everlasting improvidence — only one ear rang, and he had reported it. The next time both ears rang, and went unreported: He had expended ten cents for a fat, crimson firecracker (the kids in the school had disclosed the location of the store that bootlegged the illegal jumbos). What a firecracker! Mom was out when he got home after school. Who could resist lighting a match and touching the flame to the fuse? Now to throw the firecracker down the bedroom airshaft, filthy airshaft, where the sun only penetrated, magically, once a year, and the rats ranged freely over the garbage, the moldering newspapers, wrecked furniture, smashed bottles, and even a bashed-in pisspot, all compacted into the refuse below. What a scare that would give everybody, but especially the rats, when the red tube, fuse sputtering spitefully, exploded. He ran to the bedroom window to hurl the firecracker out but — the window was closed! Never closed in summer, but closed this time! An instant of indecision, and barely was it out of his hand when the firecracker exploded. His hand throbbed; his ears rang. He told nobody.

— So little left of the once-teeming density of living.

It’s because of the evasion, Ecclesias.

— Even so. But not only for that reason.

The ports are closed, closed to verbatim and the desiccated diurnal out there. Oh, once in awhile, through some rift or aperture, Louis, the Lucksh , as Leo Dugonitz called him (Hungarian Leo Dugonitz), lucksh meaning noodle because Louis was so elongated in height. . as we walked along the side of Mt. Morris Park after school, Louis introduced us to the new hit song: Jada, jada, jada, jada, jing, jing, jing. Bizarre but funny, a moment rescued from oblivion, three eighth-graders wending their way home from school. Well, I’ll tell you, given everything else against me, I was about to say, or as it probably would have proved to be the case, a mediocre, ordinary personality, now slowly underwent the disfiguring change that imposed a certain distorted distinction, enforced a brooding isolation, a complex uniqueness. Isn’t that strange?

— Yes.

I think so anyway. . To be sure, I have no evidence and alas, there is no way of doing the same thing twice, choosing the alternate for comparison.

— Except mentally, imaginatively, not materially.

Strange though, for awhile it seemed forgotten, during youth and manhood; most of the time, it seemed surmounted.

— But not truly, not in the psyche.

No, that’s right, Ecclesias.

— Then why do you exhume it all so often?

I hadn’t meant to tell you until this instant, Ecclesias: to make dying easier, more welcome, for myself and my fellow man, perhaps.

Jada, jada, jada, jada, jing, jing, jing. Sometimes he played touch football when impromptu sides were chosen on the playground, the dirt playground in Mt. Morris Park. He was generally a welcome candidate when it came to touch football. Not that he was very fleet of foot, but punting the ball came naturally to him — his passing was poor, again because of his inept hands — but he could punt: Somehow he had learned the knack of sending the ball up with just the right spin off the instep of his foot, with a high follow-through afterward that sent the ball forty or fifty yards. His punting won acclaim. Also he had a certain confidence about catching a football that he didn’t have about catching a baseball or a handball, even though he now wore eyeglasses: The ball was larger, softer than a baseball and not caught by hands usually, but caught in a basket formed of abdomen and arms. Only trouble was, punting tore the right toe away from the rest of the shoe, which brought down upon him Mom’s standard execrations, because the shoemaker charged ten cents to repair the break. Ira dreamed of the day he could earn enough, save up enough, to buy football shoes — with leather cleats — and a football too, so he wouldn’t have to stand around waiting to be chosen, though he usually was — but only after the friends of the kid who owned the ball were all duly included. And what if Ira was the odd man?

Like the blades of a condenser in which time is stored: Geography, History, English, Arithmetic, Physical Training, Manual Training, the weekly school assemblies, pledges of allegiance to the flag, reading of the Scriptures by Mr. O’Reilly. Once, because he had recited the poem so eloquently in class, his English teacher, henna-haired Miss Delany, asked him to recite it in the assembly: Walter Scott’s “Breathes there a man with soul so dead who never to himself hath said: this is mine own, my native land. . ” But the words which he had spoken with such feeling in the classroom became stiff and mechanical in the assembly. Ira knew his teacher was disappointed with his performance. Why couldn’t he do the same thing well a second time, or time after time, regularly, uniformly, the way some people could? The way an actor did, the way that a certain soldier did who went to every school and gave enthralling imitations of the noises made by different pieces of ordinance, different shells and machine-gun fire: Whiz-bang! Whoosh! Whe-e-e Pom-pom! Ticaticatica. . And he sang:

Chief Bugaboo was a Redman who

Heard the cry of War.