Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

myself.”
    “Watch yourself drown,” said Mr. Lougheed. Eugene laughed, but not quite reassuringly.
    The thing Mr. Lougheed wanted to know was, what was behind this? Something was behind it, some game or mockery he did not grasp. If Calla or Rex had talked like this—assuming they could talk, at such length—he would have suspected nothing. With Eugene simple-mindedness had to be a trick, and if it had really taken hold it was somehow even more of a trick.
    “So the purpose of this is to give people a jolt, so to speak? To make them doubt their senses?”
    “It might do that.”
    “How did you get yourself into it?”
    “It did start almost as a joke. I was talking to those two ladies—you know, the sisters—the blind one and the other one, I don’t know their names—”
    “I know which ones.”
    Eugene would chat with old people, he was a favorite with them; they saw him as a gentle ambassador from the terrible land of youth.
    “We were discussing things like this and I said it was a possibility. It has been done, in fact, walking on water. Recently, I mean. They said would I be willing to try it myself and I said yes.”
    “Maybe that was a bit conceited of you,” said Mr. Lougheed thoughtfully, craftily.
    “Yes I know. That night when I was meditating I let the question go down in my mind, am I doing this for my own ego? It came to me that it didn’t matter. What I am doing it for doesn’t matter. Whatever put the idea into my head to do it, I have to trust that. It may be an act that has a purpose beyond me. I know how that sounds. But I am just lending myself, I am being used. The whole thing really grew. I was going to do it for just those two old ladies but I couldn’t do it right away because I wanted time to prepare, and so we arranged for Sunday and now I’m hearing about it from people on the street, people I don’t know at all. I’m amazed.”
    “Aren’t you bothered by the thought that you might make a fool of yourself in front of that many people?”
    “That isn’t an expression that means anything to me, really. Make a fool of yourself . How can anybody do that? How can you make a fool? Show the fool, yes, expose the fool, but isn’t the fool just yourself, isn’t it there all the time? Show yourself. What else can you do?”
    You can hang on to your sanity, if possible, Mr. Lougheed could have said, but did not think of it till later. Even if he had thought of it then, the time for saying it had passed.

    Outside his door on Sunday morning, Mr. Lougheed found a dead bird. He was prepared to believe a cat had brought it. Cats did come into the house, were fed by Calla or Rover, left the smell of their urine in the downstairs hall. He picked up the bird and carried it downstairs and out into the back yard. A bluejay. He admired the cold bright color. Though they were not admirable birds, jays. He had grown up on a farm and could not help passing such judgments on all forms of plant and animal life. He remembered some visitor to the farm, a lady, not young, crying out over the beauty of a field full of wild mustard. She wore a kind of dusty pink or beige hat, chiffon, if that was the stuff, and the conspicuous folly of the hat blended with the folly of her pleasure, in his mind, and had remained to this day. Of course it was the looks, later the words, of the grown-ups, that informed him where folly lay.
    He meant to bury the bird, but he could not find anything to dig a hole with. The door had been broken off the basement. There used to be some tools in there, but he supposed they had been carried away. The ground in the back yard was like cement, anyway. Stones everywhere, broken glass. He put the dead bird in the garbage pail.
    He had lived in this house for twelve years, ever since he sold his drugstore business and came out here to live near his married daughter. His daughter and her family had moved away but he had stayed on. The house and yard had been in a run-down condition even twelve years ago, though he had not foreseen, nobody had, that they would get to be in the state they were in today. The place had belonged to a Miss Musgrave, whose family had had money. She was still living, then, in the downstairs rooms where Rex and Calla and Rover lived today. Soon after moving in Mr. Lougheed got the scythe and started cutting down the long grass in the corners of the yard. He meant to trim it up and make a decent lawn, a favor to all concerned. But he had not been