It said:
“The boys trying to fix it up here.
But these folks awful slow.
Will maybe move on until we strike a good town ha ha.”
The word, strike, was underscored.
Three weeks after her marriage, she had begun to ail.
She was pregnant then.
She did not go to a doctor, because an old negro woman told her what was wrong.
Popeye was born on the Christmas day on which the card was received.
At first they thought he was blind.
Then they found that he was not blind, though he did not learn to walk and talk until he was about four years old.
In the mean time, the second husband of her mother, an undersized, snuffy man with a mild, rich moustache, who pottered about the house; he fixed all the broken steps and leaky drains and such; left home one afternoon with a check signed in blank to pay a twelve dollar butcher’s bill.
He never came back.
He drew from the bank his wife’s fourteen hundred dollar savings account, and disappeared.
The daughter was still working downtown, while her mother tended the child.
One afternoon one of the clients returned and found his room on fire.
He put it out; a week later he found a smudge in his waste-basket.
The grandmother was tending the child.
She carried it about with her.
One evening she was not in sight.
The whole household turned out.
A neighbor turned in a fire alarm and the firemen found the grandmother in the attic, stamping out a fire in a handful of excelsior in the center of the floor, the child asleep in a discarded mattress nearby.
“Them bastards are trying to get him,” the old woman said.
“They set the house on fire.”
The next day, all the clients left.
The young woman quit her job.
She stayed at home all the time.
“You ought to get out and get some air,” the grandmother said.
“I get enough air,” the daughter said.
“You could go out and buy the groceries,” the mother said.
“You could buy them cheaper.”
“We get them cheap enough.”
She would watch all the fires; she would not have a match in the house.
She kept a few hidden behind a brick in the outside wall.
Popeye was three years old then.
He looked about one, though he could eat pretty well.
A doctor had told his mother to feed him eggs cooked in olive oil.
One afternoon the grocer’s boy, entering the area-way on a bicycle, skidded and fell.
Something leaked from the package.
“It aint eggs,” the boy said.
“See?”
It was a bottle of olive oil.
“You ought to buy that oil in cans, anyway,” the boy said.
“He cant tell no difference in it.
I’ll bring you another one.
And you want to have that gate fixed.
Do you want I should break my neck on it?”
He had not returned by six oclock.
It was summer.
There was no fire, not a match in the house.