The Heat of the Sun

Billicay was silent all the way.
    By the time we got back it was dark, and the others were in the dining hall. Furtively, Le Vol and I took Billy Billicay up to the dorm and put him to bed. With the unspoken, steady conviction
of schoolboys, we would say nothing of what Scranway had done: it was our secret, as if we were ashamed.
    We could not have saved Billy Billicay. I smoothed his chill forehead. In stripy pyjamas, he lay back on his pillow. Without his spectacles, his eyes were haunted, hollow, as if already he had
left life behind. No one knew much about Billy Billicay. He was a person of no importance, one of those destined to pass through the world like a phantom, leaving no mark.
    The day after, Billy Billicay rose as if nothing had happened, sat in the dining hall in his usual silence, and slipped crabwise down the corridors, eyes averted. The day after that, he cut
classes in the afternoon. No one knew where he had gone; it was some time, indeed, before the alarm was raised. Later, we heard that they had found him in the graveyard.
    The rope, secured by Quibble, still hung from the tree.
    McManus II, the dorm room where I slept at Blaze, was a long, high-ceilinged chamber, partitioned in parallel lines. The partitions, evidently, had been put in place to afford
us some protection against violence and immorality; in truth, they fostered both. The construction was of the flimsiest. No doors were provided, only curtains; cubicles were open at the top, and
fellows could easily scale the dividing walls. In many places, partitions had been punched through; spyholes had been gouged and stuck up with chewing gum. Each cubicle contained an army-style cot,
usually rickety, with a cabinet beside it that could not be locked. In the daytime, the place was merely drab, cheerless; at night, when moonlight slanted through the windows and spilled over the
tops of the partitions, it became a place of fear. Many times I lay awake, listening to the creakings of the wind, the hootings of an owl, and, closer at hand, the whisperings and suppressed
laughter, the furtive rockings, the gasps and sometimes thumpings and shouts that ended abruptly with a dazzle of light and a master’s angry cries.
    One afternoon, soon after Billy Billicay’s death, I asked to be excused from class, saying I was unwell. It was not a lie: a febrile nervousness had afflicted me since that day at Nirvana.
I went up to the dorm. The light was a filmy grey. How strange they seemed, these lines of cubicles!
    Mine was number twelve. I pulled back the curtain on its rattling pole. I sat on the cot and it squeaked, sagged. Pictures – a horse, an actress, an automobile – had been pasted to
the partitions by fellows in the past; pasted up, torn away, and pasted over again, leaving a palimpsest of ragged colours and shapes. I thought of the evening ahead: hobbies hour, dinner, study
hall, prayers. I thought of the day to come, with its unwanted lessons: Literature, History, Latin. I thought of Billy Billicay, of what a fool he had been. How little imagination, to think that
his life could never change! – as if all he had been or ever could be was Pussy in the Well, dangling from the tree, while the elegant, rough inquisitor ripped his trousers down.
    I thought about my father. He told me once that in the life of every man there was one great good fortune and one misfortune of equal force. What these were in his case he never went on to tell
me, but my good fortune, if I had one, was to be his son. Addison Sharpless was a man of no particular gifts – he was difficult to love, moody, dissolute, but it is to him that I owe my
peripatetic life and that outsider’s angle that (I like to think) has made me a writer. He was a Southerner. Born in Georgia after the Civil War, he was the heir of a ruined family, remnants
of an ancien régime clinging to the tatters of old ways. As a boy, roaming their shabby plantation, he dreamed of a life unburdened by the past, and, after quarrelling with my
grandfather, lighted out for wilder regions of plains, mountains, deserts: Oklahoma, Colorado, Utah. Successively he became a saddle-maker’s assistant, a dry-goods merchant, a traveller in
patent medicines. In San Francisco he found himself in charge of the customs house, and it was there, in 1900, at the age of thirty-four, that he married the harbourmaster’s daughter. I was
born a year later.
    My father took up a consular posting and we sailed to