“I bring down the house.”
“What house?” He looked at her.
“The poor house?”
“I’ll bring it down,” the woman said.
“You watch the papers tomorrow.
I hope they get my name right.”
“What’s your name?
Calvin Coolidge?”
“No, sir.
That’s my boy.”
“Oh.
That’s why you had so much trouble shopping, is it?
You ought to be in vaudeville.… Will two matches be enough?”
They had had three alarms from that address, so they didn’t hurry.
The first to arrive was the daughter.
The door was locked, and when the firemen came and chopped it down, the house was already gutted.
The grandmother was leaning out an upstairs window through which the smoke already curled.
“Them bastards,” she said.
“They thought they would get him.
But I told them I would show them.
I told them so.”
The mother thought that Popeye had perished also.
They held her, shrieking, while the shouting face of the grandmother vanished into the smoke, and the shell of the house caved in; that was where the woman and the policeman carrying the child, found her: a young woman with a wild face, her mouth open, looking at the child with a vague air, scouring her loose hair slowly upward from her temples with both hands.
She never wholly recovered.
What with the hard work and the lack of fresh air, diversion, and the disease, the legacy which her brief husband had left her, she was not in any condition to stand shock, and there were times when she still believed that the child had perished, even though she held it in her arms crooning above it.
Popeye might well have been dead.
He had no hair at all until he was five years old, by which time he was already a kind of day pupil at an institution: an undersized, weak child with a stomach so delicate that the slightest deviation from a strict regimen fixed for him by the doctor would throw him into convulsions.
“Alcohol would kill him like strychnine,” the doctor said.
“And he will never be a man, properly speaking.
With care, he will live some time longer.
But he will never be any older than he is now.”
He was talking to the woman who had found Popeye in her car that day when his grandmother burned the house down and at whose instigation Popeye was under the doctor’s care.
She would fetch him to her home in afternoons and for holidays, where he would play by himself.
She decided to have a children’s party for him.
She told him about it, bought him a new suit.
When the afternoon of the party came and the guests began to arrive, Popeye could not be found.
Finally a servant found a bathroom door locked.
They called the child, but got no answer.
They sent for a locksmith, but in the meantime the woman, frightened, had the door broken in with an axe.
The bathroom was empty.
The window was open.
It gave onto a lower roof, from which a drain-pipe descended to the ground.
But Popeye was gone.
On the floor lay a wicker cage in which two lovebirds lived; beside it lay the birds themselves, and the bloody scissors with which he had cut them up alive.
Three months later, at the instigation of a neighbor of his mother, Popeye was arrested and sent to a home for incorrigible children.
He had cut up a half-grown kitten the same way.
His mother was an invalid.
The woman who had tried to befriend the child supported her, letting her do needlework and such.
After Popeye was out—he was let out after five years, his behavior having been impeccable, as being cured—he would write to her two or three times a year, from Mobile and then New Orleans and then Memphis.
Each summer he would return home to see her, prosperous, quiet, thin, black, and uncommunicative in his narrow black suits.