Boys Life

blinked, searching for it. “I don’t think I’m doin’ so good,” he said.
    Mrs. Sears leaned his head gently on her shoulder. He squeezed his eyes shut, his chest heaved, and he began to cry, and I walked out of the house into the cool night air in my pajamas because it didn’t seem right for me to be in there, a stranger at a private pain.
    I sat down on the porch steps. Tumper plodded over, sat beside me, and licked my hand. I felt an awful long way from home.
    Ben had known. What courage it must have taken for him to lie in that bed, pretending to sleep. He had known that when the screen door slammed, long after midnight, the invader who wore his father’s flesh would be in the house. The knowing and the waiting must’ve been a desperate torment.
    After a while, Ben came outside and sat on the steps, too. He asked me if I was all right, and I said I was. I asked him if he was all right. He said yeah. I believed him. He had learned to live with this, and though it was a horrible thing, he was grappling with it the best he could.
    “My daddy has spells,” Ben explained. “He says bad things sometimes, but he can’t help it.”
    I nodded.
    “He didn’t mean what he said about your daddy. You don’t hate him, do you?”
    “No,” I said. “I don’t.”
    “You don’t hate me, do you?”
    “No,” I told him. “I don’t hate anybody.”
    “You’re a real good buddy,” Ben said, and he put his arm around my shoulders.
    Mrs. Sears came out and brought us a blanket. It was red. We sat there as the stars slowly wheeled their course, and soon the birds of morning began to peep.
    At the breakfast table, we had bowls of hot oatmeal and blueberry muffins. Mrs. Sears told us that Mr. Sears was sleeping, that he would sleep most of the day, and that if I wanted to I could ask my mother to call her and they’d have a long talk. After I got dressed and packed all my belongings into the knapsack, I thanked Mrs. Sears for having me over, and Ben said he’d see me at school tomorrow. He walked me out to my bike, and we talked for a few minutes about our Little League baseball team that would soon start practicing. It was getting to be that time of year.
    Never again would we mention to each other the movie where Martians plotted to conquer the earth, town by town, father by mother by child. We had both seen the face of the invader.
    It was Sunday morning. I pedaled for home, and when I looked back at the house at the dead end of Deerman Street, my friend waved so long.

IV – Wasps at Easter
    THE METEOR, AS IT TURNED OUT, MUST’VE BURNED ITSELF TO cinders as it flamed down from outer space. A few pine trees had caught fire, but it started raining on Sunday night and the fire hissed away. It was still raining on Monday morning, when the school bell rang, and the rain fell all through that long, gray day. The following Sunday was Easter, and Mom said she hoped the rain-forecast to fall intermittently all week long-didn’t spoil the Merchants Street Easter parade on Saturday.
    Early on the morning of Good Friday, starting around six o’clock or so, there was always another parade of sorts in Zephyr. It began in Bruton, at a small frame house painted purple, orange, red, and sunburst yellow. A procession of black men in black suits, white shirts, and ties made their way from this house, with a number of women and children in somber clothing following behind. Two of the men carried drums, and beat a slow, steady rhythm to time the paces. The procession wound its way across the railroad track and along Merchants Street, the center of town, and no one spoke to each other. Since this was an annual event, many of Zephyr’s white population emerged from their houses to stand along the street and watch. My mother was one of them, though my dad was already at work by that time of the morning. I usually went with her, because I grasped the significance of this event just as everyone else did.
    The three black men who led the way carried burlap bags. Around their necks, dangling down over their ties, were necklaces of amber beads, chicken bones, and the shells of small river mussels. On this particular Good Friday, the streets were wet and the rain drizzled down, but the members of the black parade carried no umbrellas. They spoke to no one on the sidewalks, nor to anyone who happened to be so rude as to speak to them. I saw Mr. Lightfoot walking near the parade’s center, and though he knew every white face in