A Matter of Vocabulary

A Story by James Alan McPherson

THOMAS BROWN stopped going to church at thirteen after one Sunday morning when he had been caught playing behind the minister’s pulpit by several deacons who had come up into the room early to count the money they had collected in the Sunday School downstairs. Thomas had seen them putting some of the change in their pockets, and they had seen him trying to hide behind the big worn brown pulpit with the several black Bibles and the pitcher of iced water and the glass used by the minister in the more passionate parts of his sermons. It was a Southern Baptist Church.

“Come on down off of that, little Brother Brown,” one of the fat black-suited deacons had told him. “We see you tryin’ to hide. Ain’t no use tryin’ to hide in God’s House.”

Thomas had stood up and looked at them; all three of them, big-bellied, severe, and religiously righteous. “I wasn’t tryin’ to hide,” he said in a low voice.

“Then what was you doin’ behind Reverend Stone’s pulpit?”

“I was praying,” Thomas had said.

After that he did not like to go to church. Still, his mother would make him go every Sunday morning; and being only thirteen and very obedient, he could find no excuse not to leave the house. But after leaving the house with his brother, Edward, he would not go all the way to church. He would make Edward, who was a year younger, leave him at a certain corner a few blocks away from the church where Saturday-night drunks were sleeping or waiting lor the bars to open on Monday morning. His own father had been that way, and Thomas knew that the waiting was very hard. He felt good toward the men, being almost one of them, and liked to listen to them curse and threaten each other lazily in the hot Georgia sun. He liked to look into their faces and wonder what was in them that made them not care about anything except the bars opening on Monday morning. He liked to try to distinguish the different shades of black in their hands and arms and faces. And he liked the smell of them. But most of all he liked it when they talked to him and gave him an excuse for not walking down the street two blocks to the Baptist Church.

“Don’t you ever get married, boy,” Arthur, one of the meaner drunks with a missing eye, told him on several occasions.

The first time he had said it the boy had asked: “Why not?”

“ ‘Cause a bitch ain’t shit, man. You mind you don’ get married now, hear? A bitch’ll take all yo money and then throw you out in the street!”

“Damn straight!” Leroy, another drunk much darker than Arthur and a longshoreman, said. “That’s all they fit for, takin’ a man’s money and runnin’ around.”

Thomas would sit on the stoop of an old deserted house with the men lying on the ground below him, too lazy to brush away the flies that came at them from the urine-soaked dirt on the hot Sunday mornings, and he would look and listen and consider. And after a few weeks of this he found himself very afraid of girls.

Things about life had always come to him by listening and being quiet. He remembered how he had learned about being black, and about how some other people were not. And the difference it made. He felt at home sitting with the waiting drunks because they were black, and he knew that they liked him because for months before he had stopped going to church, he had spoken to them while passing, and they had returned his greeting. His mother had always taught him to speak to people in the streets because Southern blacks do not know how to live without neighbors who exchange greetings. He had noted, however, when he was seven or eight, that certain people did not return his greetings. At first he had thought that their silence was due to his own low voice: he had gone to a Catholic school for four years where the black-caped nuns put an academic premium on silence. He had learned that in complete silence lay his safety from being slapped or hit on the flat of the hand with a wooden ruler. And he had been a model student. But even when he raised his voice, intentionally, to certain people in the street they still did not respond. Then he had noticed that while they had different faces, like the nuns, whom he never thought of as real people, these nonspeakers were completely different in dress and color from the people he knew. But still, he wondered why they would not speak.

He never asked his mother or anyone else about it; ever since those four years with the nuns he did not like to talk much. And he began to consider certain things about his own person as possible reasons for these slights. He began to consider why it was necessary for one to go to the bathroom. He began to consider whether only people like him had to go to the toilet and whether or not this thing was the cause of his complexion; and whether the other people could know about the bathroom merely by looking at his skin and did not speak because they knew he did it. This bothered him a lot, but he never asked anyone about it. Not even his brother, Edward, with whom he shared a bed and with whom, in the night and dark closeness of the bed, there should have been no secret thoughts. Nor did he speak of it to Leroy, the most talkative drunk, who wet the dirt behind the old house where they sat with no shame in his face, and always shook himself in the direction of the Baptist Church, two blocks down the street.

“You better go to church,” his mother told him when he was finally discovered. “If you don’ go, you going to hell for sure.”

“I don’ think I wanna go back,” he said.

“You’ll be a Sinner if you don’ go,” she said, pointing her finger at him with great gravity. “You’ll go to hell, sure enough.”

Thomas felt doomed already. He had told the worst lie in the world in the worst place in the world, and he knew that going back to church would not save him now. He knew that there was a hell because the nuns had told him about it, and he knew that he would end up in one of the little rooms in that place. But he still hoped for some time in purgatory, with a chance to move into a better room later, if he could be very good for a while before he died. He wanted to be very good, and he tried very hard all the time not to have to go to the bathroom. But when his mother talked about hell, he thought again that perhaps he would have to spend all his time, after death, in that great fiery-hot burning room she talked about. She had been raised in the Southern Baptist Church, and had gone to church, to the same minister, all her life, up until the time she had to start working on Sundays. But she still maintained her faith and never talked, in her conception of hell and how it would be for Sinners, about the separate rooms for certain people. Listening to his mother in the kitchen talk about hell while she cooked supper and sweated, Thomas thought that perhaps she knew more than the nuns because there were so many people who believed like her, including the bald Reverend Stone in their church, in that one great burning room and the Judgment Day.

“The hour’s gonna come when the Horn will blow,” his mother told him while he cowered in the corner behind the stove, feeling the heat from it on his face. “The Horn’s gonna blow all through the world on that Great Morning, and all them in the graves will hear it and be raised up,” she would continue.

“Even Daddy?”

His mother paused, and let the spoon stand still in the pot on the stove. “Everybody,” she said, “both the Quick and the Dead and everybody that’s alive. Then the stars are gonna fall, and all the Sinners will be cryin’ and tryin’ to hide in the corners and under houses. But it won’t do no good to hide. You can’t hide from God. Then they gonna call the roll with everybody’s name on it, and the sheeps are gonna be divided from the goats, the Good on the Right and the Bad on the Left. And then the ground’s gonna open up, and all them on the Left are gonna fall right into a burnin’ pool of fire and brimstone, and they’re gonna be cryin’ and screamin’ for mercy, but there won’t be none because it will be too late. Especially for those who don’t repent and go to church.”

Now his mother stood over him, her eyes almost red with emotion, her face wet from the stove and shining black, and very close to tears.

Thomas felt the heat from the stove where he sat in the corner next to the broom. He was scared. He thought about being on the Left with Leroy and Arthur, and all the men who sat on the corner two blocks away from the Baptist Church. He did not think it was at all fair.

“Won’t there be rooms for different people?” he asked her.

“What kind of rooms?” his mother said.

“Rooms for people who ain’t done too much wrong.”

“There ain’t gonna be no separate rooms for any Sinners on the Left! Everybody on the Left is gonna fall right into the same fiery pit, and the ones on the Right will be raised up into glory. Where do you want to be, Tommy?”

He could think of nothing to say.

“You want to be on the Right or on the Left?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?” she said. “You still got time, son.”

“I don’t know if I can ever get over on the Right,” Thomas said.

His mother looked down at him. She was a very warm person, and sometimes she hugged him or touched him on the face when he least expected it. But sometimes she was severe.

“You can still get on the Right side, Tommy, if you go to church.”

“I don’t see how I can,” he said again.

“Go on back to church, son,” his mother said.

“I’ll go,” Tommy said. But he was not sure whether he could ever go back again after what he had done right behind the pulpit. But to please her, and to make her know that he was really sorry and that he would really try to go back to church, and to make certain in her mind that he genuinely wanted to have a place on the Right on Judgment Day, he helped her cook dinner and then washed the dishes afterward.

They lived on the top floor of a gray wooden house next to a funeral parlor. Thomas and his brother could look out the kitchen window and down into the rear door of the funeral parlor, which was always open, and watch George Herbs, the mortician, working on the bodies. Sometimes George Herbs would come to the back door of the embalming room in his white coat and look up at them, and laugh, and wave for them to come down. They never went down. And after a few minutes of getting fresh air, George Herbs would look at them again and go back to his work.

Down the street, almost at the corner, was a police station. There were always fat, white-faced, red-nosed, blue-suited policemen who never seemed to go anywhere sitting in the small room. Also, these two men had never spoken to Thomas except on one occasion when he had been doing some hard thinking about getting on the Right Side on Judgment Day.

He had been on his way home from school in the afternoon. It was fall, and he was kicking leaves. His eyes fell upon a green five-dollar bill on the black-sand sidewalk, just a few steps away from the station. At first he did not know what to do; he had never found money before. But finding money on the ground was a good feeling. He had picked up the bill and carried it home, to a house that needed it, to his mother. It was not a great amount of money to lose, but theirs was a very poor street; and his mother had directed him, without any hesitation, to turn in the lost five dollars at the police station. And he had done this, going to the station himself and telling the men, in a scared voice, how he had found the money, where he had found it, and how his mother had directed him to bring it to the station in case the loser should come in looking for it. The men had listened and then had spoken to him for the first time. They even eventually smiled at him and then at each other, and a man with a long red nose with gray spots on it had assured him, still smiling, that if the owner did not call for the five dollars in a week, they would bring the money to his house and it would be his. But the money never came to his house, and when he saw the red-nosed policeman coming out of the station much more than a week later, the man did not even look at him, and Thomas had known that he should not ask what had happened to the money. Instead, in his mind, he credited it against that Judgment Time when, perhaps, there would be some uncertainty about whether he should stand on the Right Side, or whether he should cry with Leroy and Arthur and the other sinners on the Left.

There was another interesting place on that street. It was across from his house, next to the Michelob Bar on the corner. It was an old brown house, and an old woman, Mrs. Quick, lived there. Every morning on his way to school, Thomas would see her washing her porch with potash and water in a steel tub and a little stiff broom. The boards on her porch were very white from so much washing, and he could see no reason why she should have to wash it every morning. She never had any visitors to track it except the Crab Lady, who, even though she stopped to talk with Mrs. Quick every morning on her route, never went up on the porch. Sometimes the Crab Lady’s call would waken Thomas and his brother in the big bed they shared. “Crabs! Buy my crabs!” she would sing, like a big, loud bird because the words all ran together in her song, and it sounded to them like “Crabbonnieee crabs!” They both would race to the window in their underwear and watch her walking on the other side of the street, an old wicker basket balanced on her head and covered with a bright red cloth that moved up and down with the bouncing of the crabs under it as she walked. She was a big, dull-black woman and wore a checkered apron over her dress, and she always held one hand up to the basket on her head as she swayed down the black-dirt sidewalk. She did not sell many crabs on that street; they were too plentiful in the town. But still she came, every morning, with her song: “Crabbonniee crabs!”

“Wonder why she comes every morning,” Thomas said to his brother once. “She oughta come at night when the guys are over at Michelob.”

“Maybe she just comes by to talk to Mrs. Quick,” Edward said.

And that was true enough. For every morning the Crab Lady would stop and talk to Mrs. Quick while Mrs. Quick washed down her porch. She would never set the basket on the ground while she talked, but stood all the time with one hand on her wide hip and the other balancing the basket on her head, talking. And Mrs. Quick would continue to scrub her porch. Both Thomas and his brother would watch them until their mother came in to make them wash and dress for school. Leaving the window, Thomas would try to get a last look at Mrs. Quick, her head covered by a white bandanna, her old back bent in scrubbing, still talking to the Crab Lady. He would wonder what they talked about every morning. Not knowing this bothered him, and he began to imagine their morning conversations. Mrs. Quick was West Indian and knew all about roots and voodoo, and Thomas was afraid of her. He suspected that they talked about voodoo and who in the neighborhood had been fixed. Roots were like voodoo, and knowing about them made Mrs. Quick something to be feared. Thomas thought that she must know everything about him and everyone in the world because once he and Edward and Luke, a fat boy who worked in the fish market around the corner, had put some salt and pepper and brown sand in a small tobacco pouch, and had thrown it on her white-wood porch, next to the screen door. They had done it as a joke and had run away afterward, into an alley between his house and the funeral parlor across the street, and waited for her to come out and discover the pouch. They had waited for almost fifteen minutes, and still she did not come out; and after all that time waiting it was not such a good joke anymore, and so they had gone off to the graveyard to gather green berries for their slingshots. But the next morning, on his way to school, Mrs. Quick had looked up from scrubbing her porch and called him over, across the dirt street. “You better watch yourself, boy,” she had said. “You hear me?”

“Why?” Thomas had asked, frightened and eager to be running away to join his brother.

Mrs. Quick had looked at him, very intensely. Her face was black and wrinkled, and her hair was white where it was not covered by the white bandanna. Her mouth was small and tight and deliberate, and her eyes were dark and red where they should have been white. “You left-handed, ain’t you?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Then watch yourself. Watch yourself good, less you get fixed.”

“I ain’t done nothin’ ” he said. But he knew that she was aware that he was lying.

“You left-handed, ain’t you?”

He nodded.

“Then you owe the Devil a day’s work, and you better keep watch on yourself less you get fixed.” Upon the last word in this pronouncement she had locked her eyes on his and seemed to look right into his soul. It was as if she knew that he was doomed to stand on the Left Side on that Day, no matter what good he still might do in life. He looked away, and far up the street he could see the Crab Lady swaying along in the dirt. Then he had run.

LATE in the night there was another sound Thomas could hear in his bed, next to his brother. This sound did not come every night, but it was a steady sound, and it made him shiver when it did come. He would be lying close and warm against his brother’s back, and the sound would bring him away from sleep.

“Mr. Jones! I love you, Mr. Jones!”

This was the horrible night sound of the Barefoot Lady, who came whenever she was drunk to rummage through the neighborhood garbage cans for scraps of food, and to stand before the locked door of the Herbert A. Jones Funeral Parlor and wake the neighborhood with her cry: “Mr. Jones! I love you, Mr. Jones!”

“Eddie, wake up!” He would push his brother’s back. “It’s the Barefoot Lady again.”

Fully awake, they would listen to her pitiful moans, like a lonely dog at midnight or the faraway low whistle of a night train pushing along the edge of the town, heading north.

“She scares me,” he would say to his brother.

“Yeah, Tommy,” his brother would say.

There were certain creaking sounds about the old house that were only audible on the nights when she screamed.

“Why does she love Mr. Jones? He’s a undertaker,” he would ask his brother. But there would be no answer because his brother was younger than him and still knew how to be very quiet when he was afraid.

“Mr. Jones! I love you, Mr. Jones!”

“It’s nighttime,” Thomas would go on, talking to himself. “She ought to be scared by all the bodies he keeps in the back room. But maybe it ain’t the bodies. Maybe Mr. Jones buried somebody for her a long time ago for free, and she likes him for it. Maybe she never gets no chance to see him in the daytime so she comes at night. I bet she remembers that person Mr. Jones buried for her for free and gets drunk and comes in the night to thank him.”

“Shut up, Tommy, please,” Eddie said in the dark. “I’m scared.” Eddie moved closer to him in the bed and then lay very quiet. But he still made the covers move with his trembling.

“Mr. Jones! I love you, Mr. Jones!”

Thomas thought about the back room of the Herbert A. Jones Funeral Parlor and the blue-andwhite neon sign above its door and the Barefoot Lady, with feet caked with dirt and layers of skin and long yellow-and-black toenails, standing under that neon light. He had only seen her once in the day, but that once had been enough. She wore rags and an old black hat, and her nose and lips were huge and pink, and her hair was long and thick and hanging far below her shoulders, and she had been drooling at the mouth. He had come across her one morning digging into their garbage can for scraps. He had felt sorry for her because he and his brother and his mother threw out very few scraps, and had gone back up the stairs to ask his mother for something to give her. His mother had sent down some fresh biscuits and fried bacon, and watching her eat with her dirty hands with their long black fingernails had made him sick. Now, in his bed, he could still see her eating the biscuits, flakes of the dough sticking to the bacon grease around her mouth. It was a bad picture to see above his bed in the shadows on the ceiling. And it did not help to close his eyes, because then he could see her more vividly, with all the horrible dirty colors of her rags and face and feet made sharper in his mind. He could see her the way he could see the bad men and monsters from The Shadow and Suspense and Gangbusters and The Six Shooter every night after his mother had made him turn off the big brown radio in the living room. He could see these figures, men with long faces and humps in their backs, and old women with streaming hair dressed all in black, and cats with yellow eyes, and huge rats, on the walls in the living room when it was dark there; and when he got into bed and closed his eyes, they really came alive and frightened him, the way the present picture in his mind of the Barefoot Lady, her long toenails scratching on the thirty-two stairs as she came up to make him give her more biscuits and bacon, was frightening him. He did not know what to do, and so he moved closer to his brother, who was asleep now. And downstairs, from below the blue-and-white neon sign above the locked door to the funeral parlor, he heard her scream again; a painful sound, lonely, desperate, threatening, impatient, angry, hungry, he had no word to place it.

“Mr. Jones! I love you, Mr. Jones!”

Both Thomas and his brother worked at the F & F Supermarket, owned by Milton and Sarah Feinburg. Between the two of them they made a good third of a man’s salary. Thomas had worked himself up from carry-out boy and was now in the Produce Department, while his brother, who was still new, remained a carry-out boy. Thomas enjoyed the status he had over the other boys. He enjoyed not having to be put outside on the street like the boys up front whenever business was slow and Milton Feinburg wanted to save money. He enjoyed being able to work all week after school while the boys up front had to wait for weekends when there would be sales and a lot of shoppers. He especially liked becoming a regular boy because then he had to help mop and wax the floors of the store every Sunday morning and could not go to church. He knew that his mother was not pleased when he had been taken into the mopping crew because now he had an excuse not to attend church. But being on the crew meant making an extra three dollars, and he knew that she was pleased with the money. Still, she made him pray at night, and especially on Sunday.

His job was bagging potatoes. Every day after school and all day Saturday he would come into the air-conditioned produce room, put on a blue smock, take a fifty-pound sack of potatoes off a huge stack of sacks, slit open the sack and let the potatoes fall into a shopping cart next to a scale, and proceed to put them into fiveand ten-pound plastic bags. It was very simple; he could do it in his sleep. Then he would spend the rest of the day bagging potatoes and looking out the big window, which separated the produce room from the rest of the store, at the customers. They were mostly white, and after almost a year of this type of work, he began to realize why they did not speak to him in the street. And then he did not mind going to the bathroom, knowing, when he did go, that all of them had to go, just as he did, in the secret places they called home. Some of them had been speaking to him for a long time now, on this business level, and he had formed some small friendships grounded in this.

He knew Richard Burke, the vet who had a war injury in his back and who walked funny. Richard Burke was the butcher’s helper, who made hamburger from scraps of fat and useless meat cuttings and red powder in the back of the produce room, where the customers could not see. He liked to laugh when he mixed the red powder into the ground white substance, holding gobs of the soft stuff up over the big tub and letting it drip, and then dunking his hands down into the tub again. Sometimes he threw some of it at Thomas, in fun, and Thomas had to duck. But it was all in fun, and he did not mind it except when the red-andwhite meat splattered the window and Thomas had to clean it off so that his view of the customers, as he bagged potatoes, would not be obstructed.

He thought of the window as a one-way mirror which allowed him to examine the people who frequented the store without being noticed himself. His line of vision covered the entire produce aisle, and he could see everyone who entered the store making their way down that aisle, pushing their carts and stopping, selectively, first at the produce racks, then at the meat counter, then off to the side, beyond his view, to the canned goods and frozen foods and toilet items to the unseen right of him. He began to invent names for certain of the regular customers, the ones who came at a special time each week. One man, a gross fat person with a huge belly and the rough red neck and face of a farmer, who wheeled one shopping cart before him while he pulled another behind, Thomas called Big Funk because, he thought, no one could be that fat and wear the same faded dungaree suit each week without smelling bad. Another face he called the Rich Old Lady, because she was old and pushed her cart along slowly, with a dignity shown by none of the other shoppers. She always bought parsley, and once, when Thomas was wheeling a big cart of bagged potatoes out to the racks, he passed her and for just an instant smelled a perfume that was light and very fine to smell. It did not linger in the air like most other perfumes he had smelled. And it seemed to him that she must have had it made just for her and that it was so expensive that it stayed with her body and would never linger behind her when she had passed a place. He liked that about her. Also, he had heard from the boys up front that she would never carry her own groceries to her house, no more than half a block from the store, and that no matter how small her purchases were, she would require a boy to carry them for her and would always tip a quarter. Thomas knew that there was always a general fight among the carry-out boys whenever she checked out. Such a fight seemed worthy of her. And after a while of watching her, he would make a special point of wheeling a cart of newly bagged potatoes out to the racks when he saw her come in the store, just to smell the perfume. But she never noticed him either.

“You make sure you don’t go over on them scales now,” Miss Hester, the Produce manager, would remind him whenever she saw him looking for too long a time out the window. “Mr. Milton would git mad if you went over ten pounds.”

Thomas always knew when she was watching him and just when she would speak. He had developed an instinct for this from being around her. He knew, even at that age, that he was brighter than she was; and he thought that she must know it too because he could sense her getting uncomfortable when she stood in back of him in her blue smock, watching him lift the potatoes to the plastic bag until it was almost full, and then the plastic bag up to the gray metal scale, and then watching the red arrow fly across to ten. Somehow it almost always stopped wavering at exactly ten pounds. Filling the bags was automatic with him, a conditioned reflex, and he could do it quite easily, without breaking his concentration on things beyond the window. And he knew that this bothered her a great deal; so much so, in fact, that she continually asked him questions, standing by the counter or the sink behind him, to make him aware that she was in the room. She was always nervous when he did not say anything for a long time, and he knew this too, and was sometimes silent, even when he had something to say, so that she could hear the thud and swish of the potatoes going into the bag, rhythmically, and the sound of the bags coming down on the scale, and after a second, the sound, sputtering and silken, of the tops of the bags being twisted and sealed in the tape machine. Thomas liked to produce these sounds for her because he knew she wanted something more.

Miss Hester had toes like the Barefoot Lady, except that her nails were shorter and cleaner, and she was white. She always wore sandals, was hefty like a man, and had hair under her arms. Whenever she smiled he could not think of her face or smile as that of a woman. It was too tight. And her laugh was too loud and came from too far away inside her. And the huge crates of lettuce or cantaloupes or celery she could lift very easily made her even less a woman. She had short redbrown hair, and whenever he got very close to her it smelled funny, unlike the Rich Old Lady’s smell.

“What you daydreamin’ about so much all the time?” she asked him once.

“I was just thinking,” he had said.

“What about?”

“School and things.”

He could sense her standing behind him at the sink, letting her hands pause on the knife and the celery she was trimming.

“You gonna finish high school?”

“I guess so.”

“You must be pretty smart, huh, Tommy?”

“No. I ain’t so smart,” he said.

“But you sure do think a lot.”

“Maybe I just daydream,” Thomas told her.

Her knife had started cutting into the celery branches again. He kept up his bagging.

“Well, anyway, you a good worker. You a good boy, Tommy.”

Thomas did not say anything.

“Your brother, he’s a good worker too. But he ain’t like you though.”

“I know,” he said.

“He talks a lot up front. All the cashiers like him.”

“Eddie likes to talk,” Thomas said.

“Yeah,” said Miss Hester. “Maybe he talks too much. Mr. Milton and Miss Sarah are watchin’ him.”

“What for?”

She stopped cutting the celery again. “I dunno,” she said. “I reckon it’s just that he talks a lot.”

On Saturday nights Thomas and his brother would buy the family groceries in the F & F Supermarket. Checking the list made out by his mother gave Thomas a feeling of responsibility that he liked. He was free to buy things not even on the list, and he liked this too. They paid for the groceries out of their own money, and doing this, with some of the employees watching, made an especially good feeling for Thomas. Sometimes they bought ice cream or a pie or something special for their mother. This made them exceptional. The other black employees, the carry-out boys, the stock clerks, the bag boys, would have no immediate purpose in mind for their money beyond eating a big meal on Saturday nights or buying whiskey from a bootlegger because they were minors, or buying a new pair of brightly colored pants or pointed shoes to wear into the store on their days off, as if to make all the other employees see that they were above being, at least on this one day, what they were all the rest of the week.

Thomas and Edward did not have days off; they worked straight through the week, after school, and they worked all day on Saturdays. But Edward did not mop on Sunday mornings, and he still went to church. Thomas felt relieved that his brother was almost certain to be on the Right Side on That Day because he had stayed in the church and would never be exposed to all the stealing the mopping crew did when they were alone in the store on Sunday mornings with Lloyd Bailey, the manager, who looked the other way when they took packages of meat and soda and cartons of cigarettes. Thomas suspected that Mr. Bailey was stealing bigger things himself, and that Milton Feinburg, a big-boned Jew who wore custom-made shoes and smoked very expensive, bad-smelling green cigars, knew just what everyone was stealing and was only waiting for a convenient time to catch certain people. Thomas could see it in the way he smiled and rolled the cigar around in his mouth whenever he talked to certain of the bigger stealers; and seeing this, Thomas never stole. At first he thought it was because he was afraid of Milton Feinburg, who had green eyes that could look as deep as Mrs. Quick’s; and then he thought that he could not do it because the opportunity only came on Sunday mornings when, if he had never told that first lie, he should have been in church.

Both Milton and Sarah Feinburg liked him. He could tell it by the way Sarah Feinburg always called him up to her office to clean. There were always rolls of coins on her desk, and scattered small change on the floor when he swept. But he never touched any of it. Instead, he would gather what was on the floor and stack the coins very neatly on her desk. And when she came back into the office after he had swept and mopped and waxed and dusted and emptied her wastebaskets, Miss Sarah Feinburg would smile at Thomas and say: “You’re a good boy, Tommy.”

He could tell that Milton Feinburg liked him because whenever he went to the bank for money he would always ask Thomas to come out to the car to help him bring the heavy white sacks into the store, and sometimes up to his office. On one occasion, he had picked Thomas up on the street, after school, when Thomas was running in order to get to work on time. Milton Feinburg had driven him to the store.

“I like you,” Milton Feinburg told Thomas. “You’re a good worker.”

Thomas could think of nothing to say.

“When you quit school, there’ll be a place in the store for you.”

“I ain’t gonna quit school,” Thomas had said.

Milton Feinburg smiled and chewed on his green cigar. “Well, when you finish high school, you can come on to work full time. Miss Hester says you’re a good worker.”

“Bagging potatoes is easy,” said Thomas.

Milton Feinburg smiled again as he drove the car. “Well, we can get you in the stock room, if you can handle it. Think you can handle it?”

“Sure,” said Thomas. But he was not thinking of the stock room and unloading trucks and stacking cases of canned goods and soap in the big, musty, upstairs storeroom. He was thinking of how far away he was from finishing high school and how little that long time seemed to matter to Milton Feinburg.

THOMAS was examining a very ugly man from behind his window one afternoon when Miss Hester came into the produce room from the front of the store. As usual, she stood behind him. And Thomas went on with his work and watching the very ugly man. This man was bald and had a long thin red nose that twisted down unnaturally, almost to the level of his lower lip. The man had no chin, only three layers of skin that lapped down onto his neck like a red-cloth necklace. Barney Benns, one of the stock clerks who occasionally passed through the produce room to steal an apple or a banana, had christened the very ugly man “Do-funny,” just as he had christened Thomas “Little Brother” soon after he had come to the job. Looking at Do-funny made Thomas sad; he wondered how the man had lost his chin. Perhaps, he thought, Do had lost it in the war, or perhaps in a car accident. He was trying to picture just how Do-funny would look after the accident when he realized that his chin was gone forever, when Miss Hester spoke from behind him.

“Your brother’s in a lotta trouble up front,” she said.

Thomas turned to look at her. “What’s the matter?”

Miss Hester smiled at him in that way she had, like a man. “He put a order in the wrong car.”

“Did the people bring it back?”

“Yeah,” she said. “But some folks is still missin’ their groceries. They’re out there now mad as hell.”

“Was it Eddie lost them?”

“Yeah. Miss Sarah is mad as hell. Everybody’s standin’ round up there.”

He looked through the glass window and up the produce aisle and saw his brother coming toward him from the front of the store. His brother was untying the knot in his blue smock when he came in the swinging door of the air-conditioned produce room. His brother did not speak to him but walked directly over to the sink next to Miss Hester and began to suck water from the black hose. He looked very hot, but only his nose was sweating. Thomas turned completely away from the window and stood facing his brother.

“What’s the matter up front, Eddie?” he said.

“Nothing,” his brother replied, his jaws tight.

“I heard you put a order in the wrong car and the folks cain’t git it back,” said Miss Hester.

“Yeah,” said Eddie.

“Why you tryin’ to hide back here?” she said.

“I ain’t tryin’ to hide,” said Eddie.

Thomas watched them and said nothing.

“You best go on back up front there,” Miss Hester said.

At that moment Miss Sarah Feinburg pushed through the door. She had her hands in the pockets of her blue sweater and she walked to the middle of the small, cool room and glared at Edward Brown. “Why are you back here?” Miss Sarah Feinburg asked Edward.

“I come back for some water.”

“You know you lost twenty-seven dollars’ worth of groceries up there?”

“It wasn’t my fault,” said Eddie.

“If you kept your mind on what you’re supposed to do this wouldn’t have happened. But no. You’re always talking, always smiling around, always running your mouth with everybody.”

“The people who got the wrong bags might bring them back,” Eddie said. His nose was still sweatingin the cool room. “Evidently somebody took my cart by mistake.”

“Evidently! Evidently!” said Sarah Feinburg. “Miss Hester, you should please listen to that! Evidently. You let them go to school, and they think they know everything. Evidently, you say?”

“Yeah,” said Eddie. Thomas saw that he was about to cry.

Miss Hester was still smiling like a man.

Sarah Feinburg stood with her hands in her sweater pockets and braced on her hips, looking Eddie in the face. Eddie did not hold his eyes down, and Thomas felt really good but sad that he did not.

“You get back up front,” said Sarah Feinburg. And she shoved her way through the door again and out of the cool produce room.

“Evidently, evidently, that sure was funny,” said Miss Hester when the fat woman was halfway down the produce aisle. “Lord, was she mad. I ain’t never seen her git so mad.”

Neither Thomas nor Eddie said anything.

Then Miss Hester stopped smiling. “You best git on back up front, Eddie.”

“No,” said Eddie. “I’m goin’ home.”

“You ain’t quittin’?” said Miss Hester.

“Yeah.”

“What for?”

“I dunno. I just gotta go home.”

“But don’t your folk need the money?”

“No,” Eddie said.

He took off his blue smock and laid it on the big pile of fifty-pound potato sacks. “I’m goin’ home,” he said again. He did not look at his brother. He walked through the door, and slowly down the produce aisle and then out the front door, without looking at anything at all.

Then Thomas went over to the stack of unbagged potatoes and pushed the blue smock off the top sack and into a basket on the floor next to the stack. He picked up a fifty-pound sack and lugged it over to the cart and tore it open with his fingers, spilling its contents of big and small dirty brown potatoes into the cart. He could feel Miss Hester’s eyes on him, on his arms and shoulders and hands as they moved. He worked very quickly and looked out the window into the store. Big Funk was supposed to come this afternoon. He had finished seven five-pound bags before Miss Hester moved from where she had been standing behind him, and he knew she was about to speak.

“You going to quit too. Tommy?”

“No,” he said.

“I guess your folk do need the money now, huh?”

“No,” he said. “We don’t need the money.”

She did not say anything else. Thomas was thinking about Big Funk and what could be done with the time if he did not come. He did not want to think about his brother or his mother or the money, or even the good feeling he got when Milton Feinburg saw them buying the Saturday-night groceries. If Big Funk did not come, then perhaps he could catch another glimpse of Do-funny before he left the store. The Rich Old Lady would not come again until next week. He decided that it would be necessary to record the faces and bodies of new people as they wandered, selectively, with their shopping carts beyond the big window glass. He liked it very much now that none of them ever looked up and saw him watching. That way he did not have to feel embarrassed or guilty. That way he would never have to feel compelled to nod his head or move his mouth or eyes, or make any indication of a greeting to them. That way he would never have to feel bad when they did not speak back.

In his bed that night, lying very close to his brother’s back, Thomas thought again very seriously about the Judgment Day and the Left Side. Now, there were certain people he would like to have with him on the Left Side on That Day. He thought about church and how he could never go back because of the place where the deacons had made him tell his first great lie. He wondered whether it was because he did not want to have to go back to church on Sunday mornings that he had not quit. He wondered if it was because of the money or going to church or because of the window that he had not walked out of the store with his brother. That would have been good: the two of them walking out together. But he had not done it, and now he could not make himself know why. Suddenly, in the night, he heard the Barefoot Lady under the blue-and-white Herbert A. Jones neon light, screaming.

“Mr. Jones! I love you, Mr. Jones!”

But the sound did not frighten him now. He pushed against his brother’s back.

“Eddie? Eddie.”

“Yeah?”

“Wonder why she does it?”

“I dunno.”

“I wonder why,” he said again.

Eddie did not answer. But after the sound of the woman came again, his brother turned over in the bed and said to Thomas:

“You gonna quit?”

“No.”

“Why not? We could always carry papers.”

“I dunno. I just ain’t gonna quit. Not now.”

“Well I ain’t goin’ back. I’ll go back in there one day when I’m rich. I’m gonna go in and buy everything but hamburger.”

“Yeah,” said Thomas. But he was not listening to his brother.

“Mr. Jones! I love you, Mr. Jones!”

“And I’m gonna learn all the big words in the world too,” his brother went on. “When I go back in there I’m gonna be talking so big that fat old Miss Sarah won’t even be able to understand me.”

“That’ll be good,” said Thomas. But he was thinking to himself now.

“You’ll see,” said Eddie. “I’ll do it too.”

But Thomas did not answer him. He was waiting for the sound to come again.

“ Mr. Jones! I love you, Mr. Jones!”

And then he knew why the Barefoot Lady came to that place almost every night to cry when there was no one alive in the building to hear or care about her sound. He felt what she must feel. And he knew now why the causes of the sound had bothered him and would always bother him. There was a word in his mind now, a big word, that made good sense of her sound and the burning, feeling thing he felt inside himself. It was all very clear, and now he understood that the Barefoot Lady came in the night, not because she really loved Mr. Jones, or because he had once buried someone for her for free, or even because she liked the blueand-white neon light. She came in the night to scream because she, like himself, was in misery, and did not know what else to do.