Isles of Spices and Lilies

== ISLES OF SPICES AN LILIES ==
=== by Wilbur Daniel Steele ===
From The Best Stories of Wilbur Daniel Steele 1946 
A small sound of traffic coming in through the window
at the end of the ward told him he was in some city. Then, in the gray of
another dawn, a note prolonged and shivering at the bottom of sound could be
nothing but a steamer's whistle; so the city was on a coast. Now the boy on the
cot, who might have been sixteen or might have been twenty, wasted and
big-eyed, drew a forearm from under the sheet and studied the crossed anchors
tattooed above the wrist, blurred by peeling skin. He must be some kind of sailor.
There was no fright about it yet. 
Of the nurse who came presently he asked: "Where
is this?" 
"This is the contagious division, City
Hospital." 
"But what city?" 
"San Francisco. This is the scarlet-fever
ward." 
"I-I'm alone?" 
Missing the meaning of his hesitancy, she glanced at
the other empty cots. "You've had company, two or three. They're gone now.
If you'll be good and not fret, you'll soon be gone too. This, please, under
your tongue." 
And still it was no more than a shapeless unease, far
off. 
But there was a morning when an intern came with the
nurse and asked the boy his name and where he lived. 
"Don't you know?" There of a sudden it was,
fright and shame. 
"You had a hundred and three of fever when you
were picked up in the street, young fellow; you were hardly giving us much
information. . . . Now just your name and address, that's all. For the
record." 
Cornered, the boy struggled up on an elbow. "Why
do I have to tell you? You can't force me, if I don't want to!" 
The intern put his card and pen away quickly and got
up. "Of course not. Heavens! Don't you bother one bit more now. Come,
nurse." 
The boy took what comfort he could in the belief that
he had fooled them. But he couldn't fool the awful embarrassment, the awful
loneliness. Nor had he fooled the others. The nurse, returning with a glass of
something to make him sleep, smoothed his brow after he'd drunk it. 
"Don't worry, son. It often happens after things
like scarlet fever, the kind of a siege you've been through. But it's an amnesia
that passes. As you grow stronger, things will come back to you." 
They didn't, though. Out of quarantine at last, lodged
in the convalescent division, the fellow became a problem. They tried all sorts
of sudden things; flashed on him the clothes he'd been picked up in, sweat
shirt, dungarees, and sneakers, worn but clean from their disinfection. These
meant nothing, stirred no memory. Doctors of one breed and another dealt with
him. One, a young man with a crazy eagerness to know the hidden sides of things,
refused to quit. 
"For you see, if we could get you to want to
remember, you'd remember. . . . No, now, wait," he pleaded, over the
protestations of the lost one, by now as jumpy-wild as a rabbit caught in the
open, no thicket to hide in. "By 'you' I don't mean this you that's
talking, thinking here, with the top side of your cranium. No, it's the other
guy, the you that lives 'way down under, boss of the filing cabinet where every
least act and word of your life is on record, for merely the riffling of his
thumb to find. He's the guy that takes a memory and declares it out of bounds,
taboo, and he's the guy I want to talk with— if there's any God's way of
getting through the wall of hysteria he's thrown around your
consciousness." 
"I'm not hysterical! I'm not!" 
"That's all that amnesia is— hysteria of a type.
Hypnotism will sometimes help. If you're willing to let us have a shot at it —
" 
"No! Let me be! Let me go now!" 
"Easy, friend— no one's going to bother you. But
you can do it for your own self if you'd rather— probably do it every night you
sleep. Because it's that other guy that does your dreaming— if only you could
remember when you waken the parts of the dream he doesn't want you to. . . .
Listen, here's something can't hurt you. Will you, for me, give it a try?"
So it was that the boy was shifted to a private room
to sleep that night, and wasn't let sleep— not for a while, anyway. Propped up
on triple pillows, he was given a sheet of paper to stare at, blank and
blinding in the ray from a hooded bulb, "for that guy to write on when
he's ready," the doctor said over and over. "Like a signboard. Think
of it as a signboard, to point you the way." 
Over and over, ruthless, each time the boy's eyes
wandered or the lids dropped— until it must have been that words did actually
take shape, on a signboard grown enormous. Words fleeting, but half written,
and all gibberish, were they? Or were they words solid, sober, and sequent in
the idiom of dreams? The boy could never say, for he was asleep and remembered
not a bit of it. 
The first thing he himself knew, and nine-tenths
fantastic, was a fragrance heavy in nose and mouth, and ecstasy. If only he
could have hung on, lain there longer in the drift of perfume that was like
nothing on earth but heavy, hot, wet lilies, shaken by fright and bliss. But
now the doctor's face was above him, bringing him wide-awake. 
"Have I been asleep?" 
"About five hours. Tell me, did you watch the
signboard? Do you remember what you dreamed?" 
"No. I guess I didn't dream." Of what had
been dreaming, but half waking, the boy saw no need to speak "Why?"
he asked. 
"Nothing. I'll put the light out now. Go on back
to sleep." 
But the next day the doctor let him know what actually
had happened. He had a notebook, scantily penciled. "I got you to talk in
your sleep last night— if you can call it talking. I want your help now. Does
any of this mean a darn thing to you?" 
The boy took the loose leaf the other detached from
the notebook. He read aloud the fragmentary jottings, blank mystified. 
"Signboard? . . . Signboard? [At intervals, as
prompted.] . . . The White Friars. . . . [Prompted: Who are the White Friars?]
. . . The white rocks. . . . They are killing the natives— no, it's the Friars—
no— I don't know. . . . Some ivere killed Thursday and I hear the bell. . . .
[What bell?] . . . I darertt go out by the bell till dark— lay low till dark,
in behind the sisters. . . . [What sisters?] 
. . . The Three Gray Sisters. . . . Cocoa, nutmeg,
cinnamon— spices, spices, everything nices. . . . What will the wages be? . . .
Maybe death? No, no! . . . Dark and the bell is still. . . . The White Friars
are small and black with the moon behind them. . . . To hell with death! I will
dare! [Vehemently, and no more.]" 
"You must realize," the doctor hastened to
explain, "not a word of it awake may have the sense it had dreaming. That
guy in the subconscious has a thousand dodges, double meanings, association
hookups, farfetched puns. Read it again; see if there isn't some one thing can
touch a spark. For instance, your White Friars, evidently rocks of some sort— I
find there's a reef in the Irish Sea, the Gray-friars. Still, the insistence on
the word 'natives'— I don't know— it's hard to say. Mayn't the Three Gray Sisters,
taking the bell as a buoy — " 
But the boy cried sharply, "Let me think!"
His rereading had brought him as far as "Cocoa." Mightn't it mean
"coco"— coconut? Nearly it seemed there was a spark. "Coco,
nutmeg, cinnamon . . . spices, spices." Excitement shook him as he
recalled the fragrant fright-and-bliss of his waking. But no, not spices; more
like heavy lilies it had been. 
The doctor, watching his face, asked: "Caught
something?" 
"I thought for a second— but not quite. Could I
keep this and — " 
"Surely, yes, do!" 
But when the boy was returned to his room all thought
of the paper in his pocket was whisked out of mind. A middle-aged, stoutish man
with a queerly tight gray face was waiting there. The boy stopped dead, blinked
once or twice, and said: "Dad! You here?" 
"Hullo, Merrill." 
"My— yes— my name is Merrill. Merrill— August—
Mygatt. How's everything in— back in— you know — " 
"Des Moines." 
"I mean, Des Moines." 
There are all sorts of keys; Merrill Mygatt's key was
visual. Just as physical sight of his father had unlocked recognition instant
and complete, so it was to go with everything. 
He had said, "I mean, Des Moines," but it
had really been only echo to his father's prompting, and not until they got off
the train at the station days later did he remember what his home town was
like, and who his friends were. Even then it was only such friends as were
gathered there that memory accepted, face by face, and fitted back into the
pattern of life; Uncle Ben and Aunt Ella; Wake Koy, basketball captain; Belle
Wingate, such a peach; Walt Finn, boss toolmaker; so on, one by one, face by
face. And so it was with the city, each street; one look along it on entering,
and in a wink: "Of course— I know all this." 
So too with the house that was home; Cousin Natalie,
whitehaired housekeeper, smiling weepily in the doorway; then room by room,
unknown before the threshold, and in a flash familiar since babyhood; and the
picture of a pretty woman, and Merrill knew, and what had been a secret wonder
was cleared away. His mother. She'd died when he was little. 
For Merrill's father had not quite understood about
him, and shyness born of shame had kept the boy under a strain of watchful
waiting through the long trip on the train, careful to ask no question till
some chance word of his father's had prepared him for the answer. 
It was so he learned, without asking, that he was
seventeen, and it was well over a year since he'd gone away. "Run
away," he read between the lines. What they'd done about it at home was
left a blank, other than that it was only through police publicity, set going
by the hospital, that his father had learned of his whereabouts. 
"Even then I doubted it," he told Merrill.
"They made such a point of your being, probably, a sailor." 
Coloring, frowning with embarrassment, the boy hitched
up a sleeve. The man frowned in turn as he studied the crossed anchors. 
"Where ever did you get a thing like that done to
you, son?" 
"Oh-er-I dunno." 
The way he tried to throw it off, sulky-sounding,
threw the father off. They were too much alike, shy to the point of
prickliness, overquick at hiding a hurt. And there'd been too much of this
flushing and eyes turned away at any least attempt to draw Merrill out about
his year of wandering. If he could once have looked his father in the eye and
said straight, "I'd tell you if I knew, Dad, but I don't know, that's
all," it would have been different. As it was, the father ended by feeling
puzzled, evaded, and rebuffed. He certainly wasn't going to pry, he told
himself, and space and silence had grown between them. 
The irony of it was that Merrill himself had a
question he'd wanted very much to put. It recurred to his mind after he'd gone
to bed in the heaven of his own bed that first night, with a day of recovered
kin and friends and common graciousness behind him; came with such a press of
necessity that he got up, went out barefooted to his father's door, knocked,
entered, and asked quickly before pride and timidity should catch up with him:
"Dad, why was it I ran away from here?" 
To the parent it was happy miracle, contact remade.
His brow cleared, his eyes misted; he made a gruff pushing-off motion with his
hands. 
"That's all water under the bridge, son; let's
both forget it." 
That was just what Merrill didn't want, but what could
he say? 
A few days later, Mygatt got down to business, with
characteristic awkward lightness. 
, "Well, my man, how about it? Still feel the
same— don't want to go to college? Straight into the works, from bench
up?" 
Could something about that have been the "water
under the bridge"? Absurd! Not knowing what to say, Merrill said:
"Yep, I still do." 
It was a hot summer, the air through the windows of
Mygatt's metal-stamping works heavy with the dust and pollen of the midlands.
But the apprentice toolmaker didn't mind; he was too content to have his hands
busy with solid substance and measurable angles, and foreman Finn's quaint
profanity to bring his mind back when sometimes it would stray. 
The straying would begin like this, sparked by a
glimpse of the anchors on his forearm: "My palms are hard and my fingers
quick to catch the hang of things. How come?" On what seas, what coasts,
had the skin learned to callous without blistering; what queer knacks did his
fingers know that he didn't know they knew? 
One day Finn found him truant from his bench, seated
idle among the odds and ends of a rubbish shed, two bights of greasy old rope
across his palms, his eyes fixed on nothingness, resolutely blank. 
"Whaddaya think you're doin' here, me fine
felluh?" 
"Aw, nothin'— I dunno." It was a lie. Had
Merrill answered the truth, it would have been: "I was waiting to see if
knots would tie." 
Foreman Finn began to worry. "Give him
time," Old man Mygatt put him off. "Merrill's been a sick fellow,
remember." And because it went all against his business religion his voice
grew sharp: "Boys will be boys!" 
Merrill was a boy as boys will be in any country city,
any summer. Waite Koy, ex-basketball captain, home from the CCC; Belle Wingate,
with her job in Fliegenheimer's, such a peach; Winona, Emil, two or three
others of the old class; movies, dancing sometimes, long discussions in dog
wagons, or a boat on the park lake while the band played. A thin-tin boat and
Merrill rowing, his hands uneasily disdainful on the plaything oars in their
patent oarlocks, the red-and-blue-inked stigma on his forearm winking in and
out between the rays from the bandstand arcs and the moon. . . . 
"Heave ho, whaddaya know— our Merrill run off to
be a sailor!" 
"And here / used to think he was set for the
baking business!" 
A gasp of merriment at this sally of Belle's;
something of the past known to them, cryptic to Merrill. 
"Where all did you sail and what all did you see—
no kiddin', Merrill, why won't you ever loosen up and tell us?" 
"With one in every port? You don't get that guy
to talk. He's too wise. He 'don't remember.' " 
"Shiver my topmast, look at our bloody pirate— is
his face red!" 
Red, yes, ducked down, chin in neck; and in the fury
of his heart the boy who had mislaid a chunk of his life wanted above all
things to be alone, free of them and their picayune prairie-bound railleries
about things he couldn't remember and about things they couldn't guess. 
That night he got down a bundle from his closet shelf,
sweat shirt, dungarees, and sneakers, felt in a pocket and found a folded
paper. 
u Signboard? . . . Signboard? [At intervals, as
prompted.] . . . The White Friars . . . [Prompted: Who are the White Friars?] .
. . The white rocks. . . . They are killing the natives— no, it's the Friars—
no— I don't know. . . . Some were killed Thursday and I hear the bell . . .
[What bell? ].•../ daren't go out by the bell till dark— lay low till dark, in
behind the sisters . . . [What sisters?] . . . The Three Gray Sisters. . . .
Cocoa, nutmeg, cinnamonspices, spices, everything nices . . . What will the
wages be? . . . Maybe death? No, no! . . . Dark and the bell is still . . . The
White Friars are small and black with the moon behind
them. ... To hell with death! I will dare! [Vehemently, and no more.]" 
To the taunting of the words the cheap, frayed,
adventurous garments spread there seemed to add their own. "Here at home
you have three suits for play and two for work and one for Sunday, and every
day three big soft meals, security, and a thin-tin boat with patent oarlocks on
a park pond where a band plays. You— who once lived and cried vehemently: 'To
hell with death! I will dare!'" 
When Merrill did go to sleep it was with the bedside
light on and the paper held against his peaked knees, "signboard,"
though without much faith. Yet it worked, in a way. He dreamed laboriously, the
same dream over and over. He sailed a pitch-black water, but with no ship under
him and no ship's wheel in his hand; instead, three tiny figurines of pressed
coco fiber— the hear-not, see-not, speak-not monkeys they seemed at first, till
a disembodied bell went by and they were three gray-robed nuns. And one said,
"Keep clear, it's none of your affair," and one, "And you're too
young," and one, "And too afraid." 
Then there would come in sight a line of rocks,
ill-formed, far off. Now they were white with fountaining surf, now black with
the moon behind them, and now to end with, every time, they became a smooth
concrete rim with park benches above it, packed with dim people listening to a
band. And as for the gray sisters, they were three little dark spiced cakes
with coconut frosting he was eating, and when he started to wake at last the
taste of the spice was in his nose and mouth. Half awake, he thought with a
cloudy excitement: "I had hold of it!" But, wide-awake then, he
realized that the stuff of the dream had only been what his consciousness had
given it to play with: once more he recalled that it wasn't spice that should
have lingered, but a frightening sweet stench of lilies. 
The following Saturday Merrill turned up at the public
library. Awkward with shyness as he was, the girl who waited on him had to
wait. 
"Something about islands in the South Seas?"
she echoed dubiously. 
"Well-er-yes." 
He was the more vacillant because the girl troubled
him. Young, slight, grave almost to plainness, mouse-colored and mouse-quiet,
it was only when she glanced back at him on her way to the racks and, caught by
his eye, flushed hotly and bit a smile, that he half placed her. When she
returned with a trial offering, White Shadows on the South Seas, he beat around
the wretched bush. "Haven't I— somewhere — " 
"Washington High." She swallowed, pink
again. "But I was only a junior— I didn't suppose you'd remember me."
"Alice — " 
"— Doane. . . . Er— Mr. Mygatt— we are all happy
you are back in town again. I don't know if White Shadows will do, but you can
try it." 
Merrill tried it. From three till the library closed
at six he lost himself in the sad green heaven of the Marquesas. 
"Would you like to take it home to finish?"
Alice Doane suggested, seeing the excitement that widened his eyes, and the
carriage of his shoulders, as though his stature had increased by inches. 
Merrill shook his head. "It's not it. There
aren't any spices, and there have to be spices. And lilies." 
"I'll see what I can do— if you'll drop in next
week sometime." 
Wednesday was the evening the library kept open.
Wednesday evening: "I don't know, of course, Mr. Mygatt, but do you
suppose the Moluccas might do? They've been known as the Spice Islands for
centuries." 
"Where?" 
"Here's an atlas. See, the Celebes and Dutch New
Guinea, and here between them all the Moluccas— the group called the Bandas is
somewhere here in the Banda Sea." 
"The Bandas? I don't see them." 
"They're too small. But of all the spice islands
they are the spice islands— Gunong Api, Banda Neira, Lontor, Pisang and Suwangi,
Wai and Run. And in this old travel book I found in the storage racks— have you
time?— here's the passage I mean: 'With dusk the force of the northwest monsoon
had abated, and though our ship lay well out, to seaward of the dazzling reef
called Te Takeh, yet there was borne to us on the soft night air from Lontor a
fragrance of nutmeg forests, mingled with the lesser perfumes of mace and
cinnamon and stench of copra from the natives' drying yards.' " 
"Copra?" 
"That's the meat of coconuts they dry." 
"It says there 'the dazzling reef?" 
"Here, see? 'The dazzling reef.' " 
"It doesn't say if lilies grow on Lontor, does
it? Would there be any way of— er— could you find out?" 
"I'll try." 
Looking up at her, Merrill knew that "Why? ♦trembled
on her lips. But she didn't ask it. Instead: "Would you like to take the
book home?" 
Merrill let his breath out, grabbed the book, and
went. 
The next evening he was back, not inside but on the
steps, when the library closed at six— all because she hadn't asked why. He was
surcharged and stammering. "W-w-would you like— er— why don't we walk by
the Ideal and— I dunno— have a soda?" 
Nearly there, Alice stopped. She said, like a teacher:
"No true lilies. But Agapanthus formosi grows in profusion on Lontor and
Banda Neira, a cousin of Agapanthus mnbellatus, the so-called African Lily.
Heavy-flowered, its scent — " 
"I know," said Merrill; and who was she to
ask how he knew? "Look," he said, "here's the Ideal, but do you
feel like a soda— or— how about we go somewhere and— well— eat? " 
But though they passed a dozen eating places, on a
bench in the park was where they found themselves, the sun gone down, and
Merrill pressing a piece of paper into the girl's hands with a diffident
violence. 
"I woke up last night, wrote it straight off, in
bed. It's not poetry, just written like poetry. Read it!" 
Alice read it, half aloud: 
"/ hold my breath. The bell is still. The
dazzling reef is dark with murder and the moon behind. They come out to me from
Lontor, swimming, murmuring. Three Sisters, murmuring, swimming round and round
me. With lilies in their hair." 
Alice swallowed. "It is poetry!" She
reddened and looked away. Who was she, little more than adolescent and
altogether unextraordinary, to be telling Merrill Mygatt what was what? 
"No, it isn't," he protested. "But
wait. Alice, you don't even know the beginning of it. . . . Look at this."
Another paper, dingy, creased, nor head nor tail to be
made of its babble of friars and white rocks and natives, sisters, spices,
death, and a bell. . . . The girl kept her eyes on it, moving back and forth,
back and forth; she couldn't think what else to do. 
Nor could Merrill wait. "Nobody understands, not
even Dad. But Alice, honest, from before I left here, up to the day in Frisco .
. ." 
Here came the story at last, a rush and tumble, words
end over end. "... If I could just only know, Alice! Whether it was
something criminal I did, or something yellow, or what/ For instance,
look." 
Rush and tumble, words end over end. Dusk was long
gone. At a distance below, the lake reflected the yellow apple of the stand
where the band was playing. Maybe Belle was there, and Winona and the fellows.
Strange that Merrill should be out here, telling everything to this kid he
hardly knew. But how explain, even to himself, how it was he couldn't have told
it to a peachy-looking girl or anybody quick with all the comebacks? 
The thread of his words broken, confusion took him.
"Good gosh, here I invited you to eat— and look!" 
"I'm not hungry. Wait, won't you?" 
Silence for a while. Had it not been so dark he might
have seen the girl's face whitening with the effort to be old. Then:
"Merrill. You say it's only when you see faces and places you remember
things?" 
"It seems to work that way, yes. . . . Wh-what,
Alice?" 
"There's no two ways, Merrill. You've got to
go." 
Sunday, noon. Merrill's father looked tired and
bewildered and his hands that lay on the table before him in the den were
suddenly veined and old. 
"Well, son, I suppose there's no two ways. If you
want to go — " "But I don't! It's not that I want to, Dad, can't you
understand?" "I'm dull some ways. I fit in Des Moines, Iowa,
U.S.A." "And I ought to. I want to. Remember, I've one more
generation of it in me than you have, Dad. If I could be any good here, do my
work, feel right! Haven't you ever in your life looked over your shoulder and
caught a shadow of something frightening that you couldn't quite see, and known
you couldn't go on till you found out what it was?" 
"Why 'something frightening?' Now you're out of
it, obviously safe." 
"But how came I out of it safe? Did I quit on it,
all mouth, no guts? Why doesn't the subconscious want me to remember what it
was all about and how I acted? I've got to know, Dad, I've got to know!" 
"I guess you have. You better drop in at the
American Express tomorrow, look up transportation. I want you to go decently
this time." 
The boy caught at it. "The other time, why did I
go? You've never told me." 
The man's eyes went down to his hands on the table.
Red came out of his collar and covered his face. "I guess it was because
you didn't like the licking I gave you, with a trunk strap." 
"But why did you lick me? What for? Tell me,
Dad!" 
Deeper and deeper red. "Because I forgot a couple
of things. I forgot you were nearly sixteen, son. And I forgot I was nearly
sixteen once, myself, in this same town, and my old man didn't fancy some of
the company I kept, either. ... As I say, see the Express people, work out the
way that's quickest— we'll find the funds. . . . Come, there's Cousin Natalie
calling and she doesn't like her Sunday dinner to go cold." 
Merrill went up to his room after dinner, shut himself
in, sat on the bed. "So I'm going, honestly, actually going." He
waited for his heart to beat faster. It didn't. Beat slower, if anything.
Something was wrong. An impulse came to him to rush down to the den, throw open
the door, cry: "Nonsense! Where did we ever get this fool idea?" 
But he didn't. He sat there. It wasn't nonsense. It
was settledhe was going. Alice ought to know. After all, it was her doing in a
way. Merrill got to his feet before he recollected that the library was closed,
and he didn't know where Alice lived, the funny kid. 
Funny? Officious was more like it. What call had she
to mess up his life this way? The life he wanted and was fit for. 
He went to a window and looked out at the neighbors'
roofs. Now the uneasy thing that had budded the instant his father had said he
should go came full to homesick bloom. Friendly roofs. Friendly, ugly,
beautiful town. The work and the workmen. Evenings and the gang. Dad, Cousin
Natalie, this house, this room. . . . Merrill moved about the room, touching
objects, worn, homely, part and parcel of him. As he reached up to straighten a
picture of himself as a baby with a St. Bernard, his sleeve slid down from his
wrist; cross anchors looked him in the eye and brought him roughly right-about.
"What am I doing, going soft?" 
Quick to the closet and the shelf, out he brought the
bundle. Gear of what adventure, frayed by the winds, rimed with the salt,
blistered by the white-hot decks of what far seas? Chiding, deriding him. 
"What's wrong?" he parried. "It's
settled. I tell you— I'm going." 
Skeptic: "Yes? When? Right now?" 
"The minute I get the transportation fixed and
the money — " 
"Money for what? Had you money the other time? .
. . And transportation where?" 
Merrill flung the bundle back on the shelf, slammed
the door, sat on the bed, red playing tag with white across his face. But
still, through the shut door, it seemed to him the bundle went on mocking. 
"White Friars, black with blood and the moon
behind them; night of spice and lilies, ecstasy and terror; do you think for a
minute a bank and a travel bureau know where such things be? Zephyr trains and
gold-braid liners, do they ride the roads of the aching sole and the begging
thumb, steer by the wakes of tramp and schooner, junk and proa? No, lad,
there's only the one way there; you found it once. But you'll never in God's
world find it twice if you wait for money and tomorrow." 
The only thing Merrill did that was different was to
leave a note on his dresser before he went down quietly the back way. Though,
after all, how could he know it was different? Maybe he'd left a note the other
time. 
It was dusk when he stood at a crossing of Potter
Avenue; why Potter Avenue he had no notion, except that it ran west. And though
he had money in his pocket, above eight dollars of his own earned money, yet he
knew his ticket would have to be his thumb. 
Cars, cars, cars, went by without a flutter; a wishful
youth in sweat shirt, sneakers, and blue jean pants was too old a story.
Finally a T-model coupe with a home-built pickup body slowed in to the curb. 
"Where you want to get to, buddy?" the
driver called. 
Dazed and dumb as he felt, Merrill had to smile.
"The Moluccas." 
"The— where did you say?" 
"The other end of the Pacific Ocean." 
"Yeah? Take a trolley!" Off went the
T-model, the joke on Merrill. 
And here, in fact, came a trolley car. Merrill got
aboard, rang a precious nickel in the box; with that the whole thing became
fantastic. How many trolley rides, divided into halfway around the world? He
returned along the aisle of the nearly empty car and peered in around the
curtain, forward. "How far do you go?" 
The motorman turned a face immediately familiar to
Merrill. "Yeah? Go on, sell your papers!" 
The roadbed was none too good; the platform pitched
and swayed. Hanging to a rail, tongue-tied, the boy stared ahead at the
oncoming avenue. It was the first time he'd been out this way since he came
home. It happened as always, with each successive landmark as it took shape in
the twilight: "Why, of course, of course." 
A dark big building. "Washington High! I went
there." 
"No kiddin'!" The motorman had overheard.
"How's every little thing by you, Merr'l? Ain't seen you for a coon's
age." 
"I— I've been away." 
"So I heard." 
The houses grew smaller and sparser. Some to the right
backed on the avenue and faced the river it paralleled. Merrill felt queer. 
By and by, "Hogan," he said, "I used to
ride out this way with you— after school sometimes— when I was in high
school." 
"You're tellin' me?" 
The houses were thickening again, down toward the
river, and the river farther and farther off downhill. Day was only a ribbon in
the west now. 
Hogan mused, "I wish I was you, your age, night
off, with a moon like that comin' up. Give it a look, Merr'l." 
Moonrise was on the far side from Merrill. He started
to duck, to look, but his eyes never got to the moon. At a distance ahead, on a
corner among the vacant blocks, an open-faced shack stood empty, a sign reared
above it, obliquely, to catch the outbound traffic. It caught Merrill. As he
watched it grow, prickles came up his legs and up his spine. And of a sudden—
of course! How many times he'd watched and waited for that sign, all prickles. 
Brakes, and the south of the door behind him folding
back open. 
"Want off here, don't you, Merr'l? . . . With
that moon— oh, baby!" 
Merrill got out, and the car moved on. He stood in the
dimness and stared up at the signboard: 
SAMBOWSKI'S ROADSIDE 
Garden truck, poultry, eggs 
Special 
Fresh killed every Thursday 
Native White Rock Fryers 
Of course. Waited and watched for it, high-school kid,
not because of vegetables or eggs or Thursday frying chickens, but because it
signaled the cross street here, leading down to the corn-canning suburb on the
river. 
Merrill turned into it. Halfway down the hill, the
note of the bell came up to him faintly. Someone had just gone into the Grace
place, or else just come out. 
Come out. And coming up the street a pair. The
moonlight was stronger than the vestige of day now, and behind Merrill. To them
he was only a silhouette; to him they were plain. The fellow didn't matter; he
was anybody. But Merrill thought to himself with trie shock of one who has been
away: "How sharp and bitter she looks!" 
But why shouldn't she, at her age? Of the three Grace
sisters, Rose was by far the oldest. Twenty-four— five— she must be twenty-six
now. Sharper than ever, in that pointed little hat like a horn, more sarcastic,
picky, interfering. Jealous, knowing her time was by. 
It was not till Merrill was past that she looked back,
stopped short. 
"You again, you damn kid! I thought you went
away." 
"Hullo, Rosa." 
"Come on, now, turn around, beat it somewheres
else, hear me? If you think we want your old man out here givin' us hell again
— " 
Her gent had had enough and dragged her. "Cut it!
Come along!"  
Merrill went on down to the dead end in the suburban
business street. 
LORELEI BAKERY Johann Grace, Prop. 
The windows were weakly lighted, showing Saturday's
staling bread and cake. Merrill turned the knob and pushed the door open, to
the tinny clang of the bell overhead. The remembered air met him full in the
face, a mingled redolence of slab gingerbread, cinnamon buns, coffee rings,
rye-and-caraway, apple cake brown with nutmeg, cookies a half inch deep with
coconut, gone a little rancid. 
Johann, ancient of the Rhine, legless prisoner in his
chair high in a corner, brooded with puttering fingers over his till box. Only
by chance, or some instinct, did he become aware someone had entered. He gazed
at Merrill with the infant eyes of senility. 
"Haf you hear now in Germany vat dey do mit dot
Jew-people?" 
There was nothing to do but shrug and nod; Johann was
stony deaf. That was the reason for the bell, so that the girls could hear when
customers entered. 
One was coming now, slap-footed down the stair beyond
the rear partition. It was Columbine, the middle of the three Grace sisters and
the sloven, always shouldering at a strap beneath her blouse or hiking up a
stocking or, with a spit-finger, curling the hair back out. of her large,
brown, ready eyes. 
"What can I do for " She broke off, mouth
open. "O my God!" 
"Hi, Columbine." 
"You Mygatt kid, get outa here! If your old man
was to find out! Look, I'd think you'd had your bellyful once. Didn't he give
you a beatin' up? That's the way we heard it— with a trunk strap— and you run
away from home, West or somewheres. Whyn't you stay run away?" 
Merrill didn't say. He'd hardly heard. As he moved
toward her and the partition door, Columbine's voice broke high. "Lily
ain't in! She's went out, I tell you! . . . Papa, Papa! Tell him Babe ain't
here. . . . No, now, wait, Merr'l, while I tell you 'bout Lily. . . ." 
The boy passed through the doorway as if there'd been
nothing in it but air, passed on through the back part where the mixing tables
were, and came out on the terrace above the river at the rear. 
Underfoot, bricks some places, other parts cement.
Overhead, lean poles supporting a vine's old age. Beyond and below, sloping to
the water, a moraine of cans: sirup, fruit, pumpkin, baking powder. To
Merrill's right, at the far end, there was swung a Gloucester hammock,
dilapidated by wear and weather. He went and sat down in its riverward corner,
back to the water. 
He was busy wondering. He repeated out loud,
"Grace sisters, Grace sisters," first slowly, then fast. Had it been
that he'd babbled in his watched sleep, mistaken by the jotting doctor? Or had
the subconscious warder in him slurred it to "gray sisters" in pure
craft and cussedness? 
He raised his eyes. The terrace was longer than the
building was wide, this end clear of its corner, so that he had only to raise
them to see out between the bakery and the neighboring barbershop, up the hill
of the street he'd come down, to the signboard small at the crest, black
against the moonrise sky. 
He had only half heard the murmurous goings on inside
the back door, anxiety and protest. The youngest of the girls was out and
nearly to the hammock before he realized and looked. 
"Hullo, Lily." 
"Hullo-but listen, Merr'l, you can't do
this!" 
Lily must be close on twenty now. The heavenly
plumpness of a while ago began to take on more plumpness, less heavenly. The
childish face was still a childish face, though, and a strange thing to see now
as it tried to struggle with adult dismay. 
"Look, sweetie, I— I— I'm glad to see you back
and all that— but things're different— I'm a married woman. If he come home
and— and you was here, see? . . ." 
The scent of her came and lay around him, got into his
nose and mouth, humid, heavy, blent of armpits and ten-cent-store perfumery.
The extraordinary thing was that the perfume wasn't lily, but heliotrope. It
was her name that was Lily. 
"... was differ 'nt then . . . you were just a
kid . . . like a kid . . . then . . . but me bein' married now . . ." 
It ran on and on like a worried beebuzz, but Merrill's
brain took none of it. Something inside had parted with a soundless pop. A
clear wind ran all the way down through memory. . . . The bell, and Dad's feet
coming through the bakery, a Dad he wouldn't have known. The ride home. The
incredible strap. The tail of a truck that night into Dubuque ..." 
He wanted to laugh, he felt physically so light. He
pulled the belly of his sweat shirt out in a peak to see. "You, I remember
where I bought you new; Minneapolis, on that relief job sorting rubbish."
He picked at a dungaree thigh. "Salvation Army, Denver; they got me work,
too, carrying sandwich boards for that tattoo parlor." 
He was on his feet. Lily's face was a study— pulled
two ways. 
"Not that I— I don't mean to rush you off,
Merr'l. Maybe— I dunno —after all— listen, dearie— Eddie— that's my husband— he
don't get off till ten at the cannin' works— and Wh-what's this?" 
Merrill had her by a hand, pumping it up and down. 
"You don't know what you've done for me. Thank
you very much, and good-by!" 
He didn't stop running when he was through the shop
and clear; he kept right on up the cross-street hill. He thought he heard the
trolley coming, inbound. Maybe he wouldn't make it in time. 
But, he thought, what difference? Feeling as light as
he did, he wouldn't mind running all the way home.
Category:Published
Category:Steele