Bridge of Sighs

inside?” I wondered.
    “You don’t. Can’t let you in,” he sighed, as if it disappointed him powerfully to have to deliver this sad truth. “Ain’t nobody suppose to be on
this
side of the fence but me, and I ain’t suppose to leave. That seem right to you? Maintain the darn fence and let history”—here he gestured over his shoulder in the direction of Whitcombe Hall itself—“go to rack and ruince.”
    I must have looked like I agreed with him, because he decided on the spot to let me in on a secret. “Thing is, though, the fence don’t go all the way round the proppity. Stops just off yonder into them trees.” When I followed along his thin index finger with interest, he may have suffered a misgiving at having told me so much, because he said, “Who you, anyhow?”
    I told him my name was Lou.
    “That don’t tell me much,” he said. “All kinda Lous. I know half a dozen of ’em my own self.”
    I told him my last name.
    “Lynch,” he repeated thoughtfully. “Your daddy the milkman?”
    I said he was.
    “Your mama Teresa?”
    This tiny Negro man, I couldn’t help reflecting, who looked almost thin enough to slip between the bars of the fence he was painting, knew an awful lot about us Lynches.
    “Nice girl, your mama. Use to be, anyways. I expect she turn out good.” He looked me over again, in light of my parents. “So, that make you Lou Lynch Junior.”
    Shaking my head, I explained that my middle name was Charles, after my mother’s father, whereas my father’s middle name was Patrick, after I didn’t know who.
    “Narrow escape,” the little man nodded. “I’m Gabriel Mock Junior. No difference between me and my daddy, ’cept he’s dead.”
    That seemed to me a distinction worth noting, and I said so.
    “Still gotta go through life being Junior, though,” he said. “Gabriel Mock Junior, even with him dead, whether I like it or don’t. No Senior for me, ever. That seem fair to you?”
    I said it didn’t and on impulse confided that everybody called me Lucy, and he agreed that bad luck wasn’t fair either. It occurred to me to ask if he had a son, and what he’d named him.
    “Name him Gabriel Mock the Third,” he said, and stopped painting to consider the decision. “Three’s what everybody call him. All of us got crosses to bear, and that’s the truth. A man’s name the worst of it, he’s doin’ fine, I guess.”
    He returned to painting, and I climbed back on my bike. Before I could pedal off, he said, “Don’t fall down no cave hole.”
    “What cave hole?” I asked.
    “How my suppose to know which one you gon fall down?” Gabriel Mock Junior wondered back at me. “Whole proppity got caves under it, they say. Used to store liquor and gunpowder in ’em in the olden days, when all this here was England. That’s how them people made their money,” he explained, again nodding over his shoulder in the direction of the Hall. “Sellin’ liquor and guns to the redskins. Get ’em all riled up so they go down and scalp people around Albany instead of right here. Rich people all rascals. You know that, don’t you?”
    This was the first time I’d ever heard that particular view expressed, and it seemed blasphemous, especially coming from a tiny Negro. After all, didn’t we Lynches hope to be rich one day?
    “You fall down a cave hole, ain’t nobody gon hear you callin’ for help neither. Don’t expect me to come rescue you. I ain’t climbing down into the earth till I been dead at least three days. No exceptions.”
    I promised I’d be careful, which I meant to be. The idea of the ground being hollow beneath my feet made me nervous.
    “Drop by and say hello next time you in the neighborhood. I put you to work. I got all kind of brushes. Quicker I get done, the more time I got to howl. You like to howl?”
    When I frowned, he said, “You prob’ly don’t know what I mean by howlin’.”
    To illustrate, he pretended to drink something from an invisible container, then threw back his head and howled, and he continued to howl and cackle happily as I rode off down the fence. I’d already made up my mind to visit Gabriel Mock again, though for now I was more interested to see if I could find a cave without falling into it. As I said, the idea of hollow earth was disconcerting, but if the very ground beneath my feet was full of holes, I wouldn’t mind knowing where they were.
             
     
    W HAT I DISCOVERED I liked best about striking