Rabbit, Run - By John Updike Page 0,64
stop that bawling!”
Nelson’s face turns up toward the porch and he tries to explain, “Pilly have—Pilly—” But just trying to describe the injustice gives it unbearable force, and as if struck from behind he totters forward and slaps the thief’s chest and receives a mild shove that makes him sit on the ground. He rolls on his stomach and spins in the grass, revolved by his own incoherent kicking. Eccles’ heart seems to twist with the child’s body; he knows so well the propulsive power of a wrong, the way the mind batters against it and each futile blow sucks the air emptier until it seems the whole frame of blood and bone must burst in a universe that can be such a vacuum.
“The boy’s taken his truck,” he tells Mrs. Springer.
“Well let him get it himself,” she says. “He must learn. I can’t be getting up on these legs and running outside every minute; they’ve been at it like that all afternoon.”
“Billy.” The boy looks up in surprise toward Eccles’ male voice. “Give it back.” Billy considers this new evidence and hesitates indeterminately. “Now, please.” Convinced, Billy walks over and pedantically drops the toy on his sobbing playmate’s head.
The new pain starts fresh grief in Nelson’s throat, but seeing the truck on the grass beside his face chokes him. It takes him a moment to realize that the cause of his anguish is removed and another moment to rein the emotion in his body. His great dry gasps as he rounds these corners seem to heave the sheet of trimmed grass and the sunshine itself. A wasp bumping persistently against the screen dips and the aluminum chair under Eccles threatens to buckle; as if the wide world participates in Nelson’s readjustment.
“I don’t know why the boy is such a sissy,” Mrs. Springer says. “Or maybe I do.”
Her sly adding this irks Eccles. “Why?”
The purple skin under her eyes lifts and the corners of her mouth pull down in an appraising scowl. “Well, he’s like his dad: spoiled. He’s been made too much of and thinks the world owes him what he wants.”
“It was the other boy; Nelson only wanted what was his.”
“Yes and I suppose you think with his dad it was all Janice’s fault.” She pronounces “Janice” with German juice, Channiss, making the girl seem thicker, darker, more precious and important than the tenuous, pathetic image in Eccles’ mind. He wonders if she’s not, after all, right: if he hasn’t gone over to the other side.
“No I don’t,” he says. “I think his behavior has no justification. This isn’t to say, though, that his behavior doesn’t have reasons, reasons that in part your daughter could have controlled. With my Church, I believe that we are all responsible beings, responsible for ourselves and for each other.” The words, so well turned-out, taste chalky in his mouth. He wishes she’d offer him something to drink. Spring is turning hot.
The old gypsy sees his uncertainty. “Well that’s easy to say,” she says. “It’s not so easy maybe to take such a view if you’re nine months expecting and from a respectable home and your husband’s running around a few miles away with some bat and everybody thinks it’s the funniest thing since I don’t know what.” The word “bat” darts into the air like one, quick and black.
“Nobody thinks it’s funny, Mrs. Springer.”
“You don’t hear the talk I do. You don’t see the smiles. Why, one woman as good as said to me the other day if she can’t keep him she has no right to him. She had the gall to grin right in my face. I could have strangled her. I said to her, ‘A man has duty too. It isn’t all one way.’ It’s women like her give men the ideas they have, that the world’s just here for their pleasure. From the way you act you half-believe it too. Well if the world is going to be full of Harry Angstroms how much longer do you think they’ll need your church?”
She has sat up and her dark eyes are lacquered by tears that do not fall. Her voice has risen in pitch and scratches at Eccles’ face like a file; he feels covered with cuts. Her talk of the smiling gossip encircling this affair has surrounded him with a dreadful reality, like the reality of those hundred faces when on Sunday mornings at 11:30 he mounts the pulpit and the text flies from his mind and his