Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

and beat them up—even Jimmy and Duval could not beat more than maybe three men apiece—outside the Paramount Dance Hall.
    I think now they may have been rivals, or fallen-out accomplices, in the bootlegging business. My mother was opposed to drinking, as was natural in her circumstances, and Robina in my mother’s house appeared to share this view. She said their whole family was on the Pledge, their Grandma had demanded it. This may have been an exaggeration. Whatever the truth was, Stump Troy had got Jimmy and Duval into trouble, and had the means of getting them into more trouble, and they hated him.
    “Oh, they hate him! If they was out on a dark night and old Stump was out on the road, he’d soon be sorry he ever heard of them!”
    “How would he get out on the road?”
    “That’s it. Lucky for him he can’t.”
    “Jimmy and Duval are good-natured,” Robina said. “They are not mean boys. But they don’t forget when somebody has played a dirty trick on them. They don’t let up on a person then.”

    Punishments. I thought of myself walking on Howard Troy’s eyes. Driving spikes into his eyes. The spikes would be on the soles of my shoes, they would be long and sharp. His eyeballs would bulge out, unprotected, as big as overturned basins, and I would walk on them, puncturing, flattening, bloodying, at a calm pace. It wasn’t anything clean and magical I dreamed of, no saying the right word in my head and shriveling him in an instant. I would have liked his head torn from his body, flesh pulpy and dripping like watermelon, limbs wrenched away; axes, saws, knives and hammers applied to him. If I could surprise him with that knife, making not a slit in him but a round hole such as they make in maple trees for sap, I would jab in deep and then all kinds of pus, venomous substances, would spurt and flow, everything would leak away.

    The fire filled the house the way blood fills a boil. It seemed every minute ready to burst, but the skin still held. The skin was the roof, the walls, of Stump Troy’s house. Wood could seem as thin as that.
    “The roof’ll go next!” people were saying, and, “Lucky there’s no wind!”
    I did not understand why it was lucky, or what could be lucky, now. The house which I had never quite dared or wanted to look at turned out to be as simple as a house in a drawing—the door in the middle and a narrow window on either side, a dormer window over the door. Both downstairs windows had been smashed, by Howard Troy trying to get inside. Men had pulled him back. Now he was sitting on the ground in front of the burning house. He was reduced, apparently powerless, just as he had been in school.
    The town fire truck had come, but by the time they got there there was nothing for the firemen to do but praise the lack of wind. They took the ladders off but did not put them anywhere. They managed after some time to get water from the last hydrant—this was of course beyond the town limits—and they sprayed some falling-down outbuildings, the fence, and the toilet. They played water on the flames too, but that seemed just silliness and vainglory. “You might as well all stand back and spit on it!” yelled Robina, who was in a great state of excitement. She trembled and crackled, she was like a burning beam herself. She stood by the gate, where a big neglected forsythia bush had sprung into bloom, early bloom, with the snow hardly gone. She kept me beside her. My mother, who had driven us down, sat in the car a little way up the road. She was watching, presumably, but did not care to mingle.
    I was the one who had first seen the fire from my upstairs window, seen something beautiful, a flush in a corner of the night landscape, separate from the glow of the town lights, a warm spreading pool. That was the house giving off such light, through its cracks and windows.
    The trouble with Robina, I thought, was that she could not do anything about this fire. She could not boss the firemen. She tried, but they went on morosely doing what they were doing, none of them in any hurry. She could correct the information people were exchanging; that was something.
    “Lucky there’s nobody in there,” some latecomer said.
    And Robina said sternly, “Don’t you know this house?”
    Apparently there were people who did not.
    “Don’t you know who lives in this house? It’s Stump Troy.”
    There was not sufficient comprehension, so she went on.
    “It’s Stump Troy that hasn’t got