Did you?
Spoade was in the middle of them like a terrapin in a street full of scuttering dead leaves, his collar about his ears, moving at his customary unhurried walk.
He was from South Carolina, a senior.
It was his club's boast that he never ran for chapel and had never got there on time and had never been absent in four years and had never made either chapel or first lecture with a shirt on his back and socks on his feet.
About ten oclock he'd come in Thompson's, get two cups of coffee, sit down and take his socks out of his pocket and remove his shoes and put them on while the coffee cooled.
About noon you'd see him with a shirt and collar on, like anybody else.
The others passed him running, but he never increased his pace at all.
After a while the quad was empty.
A sparrow slanted across the sunlight, onto the window ledge, and cocked his head at me.
His eye was round and bright.
First he'd watch me with one eye, then flick! and it would be the other one, his throat pumping faster than any pulse.
The hour began to strike.
The sparrow quit swapping eyes and watched me steadily with the same one until the chimes ceased, as if he were listening too.
Then he flicked off the ledge and was gone.
It was a while before the last stroke ceased vibrating.
It stayed in the air, more felt than heard, for a long time.
Like all the bells that ever rang still ringing in the long dying light-rays and Jesus and Saint Francis talking about his sister.
Because if it were just to hell; if that were all of it.
Finished.
If things just finished themselves.
Nobody else there but her and me.
If we could just have done something so dreadful that they would have fled hell except us.
I have committed incest I said Father it was I it was not Dalton Ames And when he put Dalton Ames.
Dalton Ames.
Dalton Ames.
When he put the pistol in my hand I didn't.
That's why I didn't.
He would be there and she would and I would.
Dalton Ames.
Dalton Ames.
Dalton Ames.
If we could have just done something so dreadful and Father said That's sad too people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today and I said, You can shirk all things and he said, Ah can you.
And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.
Until on the Day when He says Rise only the flat-iron would come floating up.
It's not when you realise that nothing can help you--religion, pride, anything--it's when you realise that you dont need any aid.
Dalton Ames.
Dalton Ames.
Dalton Ames.
If I could have been his mother lying with open body lifted laughing, holding his father with my hand refraining, seeing, watching him die before he lived.
One minute she was standing in the door
I went to the dresser and took up the watch, with the face still down.
I tapped the crystal on the corner of the dresser and caught the fragments of glass in my hand and put them into the ashtray and twisted the hands off and put them in the tray.
The watch ticked on.
I turned the face up, the blank dial with little wheels clicking and click- ing behind it, not knowing any better.
Jesus walking on Galilee and Washington not telling lies.
Father brought back a watch-charm from the Saint Louis Fair to Jason: a tiny opera glass into which you squinted with one eye and saw a skyscraper, a ferris wheel all spidery, Niagara Falls on a pinhead.
There was a red smear on the dial.
When I saw it my thumb began to smart.
I put the watch down and went into Shreve's room and got the iodine and painted the cut.
I cleaned the rest of the glass out of the rim with a towel.