During the spring, what with chores at The Bluebird, school, and difficulties in out-manoeuvring his mother, Daniel had found it possible only to make hurried, furtive visits to his grandfather. Strictly speaking, his mother had never actually forbidden him to call on his grandfather, but Daniel had never had a moment’s doubt as to what she preferred him to do. The visits Daniel made to his grandfather’s felt furtive. He and his mother had chosen to pretend that he no longer had any interest in seeing the old man. It didn’t matter that this was a lie. What was important was that it made life simpler and safer for all concerned. His mother could ignore his disloyalty as long as he didn’t rub her nose in it and Daniel could play the game of the good and obliging son. In this situation he couldn’t help feeling devious and insincere and the promoter of injured feelings. If two weeks passed without his dropping by Alec’s, his conscience was clear with his mother but unsettled and guilty in regard to his grandfather.
It was bad news when the old man punished him by sulking, but some relief could be had from that, he could look away from the long face and concentrate his attention on the television. What was in his grandfather’s favour was that he never had a harsh word to say about her, while she was constantly going on about him, hammer and tongs, harping and nattering on his faults and failings and downright black nature. Sometimes Daniel wanted to ask her who she was trying to convince. Although she didn’t know it, it had been one of these rants shortly before Valentine’s Day that finally drove Daniel over the edge. For the six weeks following the breach that occurred at Christmas, he had not been able to summon up the courage to seek his grandfather out. But her going on like a maniac, yammer, yammer, had finally driven him to it. Fuck that noise, he said to himself, and went out and bought Alec the biggest, dopiest, most sentimental valentine he could find and delivered it by hand to his grandfather’s house. The old boy was tickled pink, there was no hiding it. Never handy with words, he tried to slip his grandson a five-dollar bill. Ordinarily, Daniel would have snatched it up, but that day, under the circumstances, he felt it would be like taking a bribe or kickback or something. So he said no, so as not to spoil the mood of the occasion.
It really did gripe his ass the way his mother went on about his grandfather. He wished she’d shut her mouth. “He was giving you cigarettes and whisky when I was living right in the house,” she was fond of saying. “God alone knows what he’d feel free to introduce you to with me nowhere in sight.”
In May, Daniel took the risk of playing hooky for an entire day to help his grandfather plant the garden. His mother would have had him by the short and curlies if she’d got wind of that. Daniel understood how stupid it was to take the chance, but the old man’s continual fretting and fussing over whether or not he would get his garden seeded by Victoria Day struck Daniel as so pathetic that he thought he had better pitch in and help finish the job or the old man would never enjoy a moment’s peace that spring. Daniel was pretty sure the worry over such a stupid thing was actually preventing his grandfather from sleeping.
As Victoria Day drew nearer, Daniel heard Alec say a hundred times if he heard him say it once: “There isn’t a year in the last twenty I missed having the garden in by the Queen’s birthday – and look where I’m at now.”
Daniel sensed that lately his grandfather wasn’t quite the same. He would brood about silly things like the garden and was prone to hair-trigger explosions of temper. When Daniel asked him what difference it made if the garden wasn’t planted by Victoria Day but instead went in a few days later, the question seemed to confuse and confound the old man. But from confusion he quickly passed over into anger and began to shout menacingly that if Daniel didn’t know what difference it made, that only proved what an ignorant snip he was. There were other changes Daniel had noticed since Christmas. His grandfather struck him as generally less alert and certainly much more forgetful than before.
To put an end to all the bitching and moaning about the approach of Victoria Day, the boy promised the old man that he would give him a hand with the planting on the Friday before the long weekend. On the weekends his mother would monopolize his time at The Bluebird. Daniel lied and told his grandfather that he would have the Friday off because of a teachers’ convention. When his grandfather saw all the kids trooping past the house with books stacked in their arms on the day of the “holiday,” Daniel supposed the old boy would give him a sly wink and call him a rascal. But when Friday arrived and all the kids went streaming by the house at eight forty-five in the morning, obviously on their way to classes, Alec didn’t give them a second glance as he turned the earth in his garden with a potato fork. Nor did he say a word to Daniel. Why? Daniel asked himself. Didn’t he see them? Or was it that he couldn’t put two and two together? Or was he so obsessed with his Victoria Day deadline that he was prepared to overlook anything, so long as it helped him to meet it?
As to why his grandfather had fallen so far behind in his planting schedule – that was no mystery to Daniel once he had seen him at work. There were moments, standing in the midst of his plot, that Alec looked positively bewildered, a man who had lost his bearings and had no inkling of where he was. He would barely begin one task when he was distracted by another. No sooner did he pick up a rake than he laid it down with a bemused look on his face and wandered off to the tool shed to hunt up stakes and twine to lay out rows. With his hands full of stakes and twine it would suddenly strike him that there wasn’t much sense in stringing out guides over unraked ground. The stakes and ball of twine would be tossed in the tall, unmowed grass at the edge of the garden where they would be lost. Meanwhile, Alec would take up a rake and scratch furiously back and forth in the dirt until another notion seized him. By mid-morning Daniel was so exasperated he could have screamed. Everything was taking twice as long as it should have, the old man misplaced everything he touched, he blundered into the taut twine Daniel stretched, stumbling and wrenching the stakes from the earth; he sowed the first half of a row with peas and the last half absentmindedly with beans.
Somewhere around four o’clock, after nearly seven hours of uninterrupted labour, the garden was finished. The old man surveyed their work and his face visibly relaxed as he announced that a small celebration was in order. While Daniel stowed the tools away in the shed, he would go into the house and crack them a couple of beers.
Five minutes later, Daniel found the dusty, sweaty old man asleep on the chesterfield. The boy hunted up a blanket and covered him so he wouldn’t take a chill when the perspiration dried on him. Then he went into the kitchen and opened the fridge, found a beer, and settled on a chair to drink it. Promises were made to be kept. Alec owed him this. Before leaving, he turned on the kitchen light, so that if his grandfather woke in the middle of the night he wouldn’t be confused about where he was, the light would act as beacon to help him find his way up the stairs and to his bed.
Now, with the start of summer vacation, Daniel is able to visit the old man nearly every day. He reaches an agreement with his mother that if he works for her half-days, the other half of the day is his own. Either he takes the morning shift, clearing tables, scraping, rinsing, and stacking breakfast dishes, and doing other odd jobs that have to be completed before preparations are begun for making dinner, or he can take the supper shift which begins at four and lasts until nine when the last man belches and farts his way out the door of the restaurant. The choice is up to him. All his old lady asks is that each Monday he mark his schedule on the calendar which hangs by the stove so that she can allot the remainder of her staff their hours. As long as he is punctual and sticks to the allotted shifts, she doesn’t poke her nose into his comings and goings too closely, although every once in a while in the midst of the clamour of the kitchen she remembers she is a mother and brushes up on the old Spanish Inquisition. It keeps them both in practice.
“So where were you all afternoon?”
“Around.”
“Around where?”
Being as there is not much around in a turd town like Connaught, it is not always easy to manufacture a plausible and satisfactory lie just like that, at the drop of a hat. He tries on the library for size. His mother favours libraries as suitable haunts.
“I went to the library and looked at books.”
“Find anything interesting? What did you read?”
“I don’t know. Just books.”
“I can check you know. One phone call is all it takes. I can ask that woman at the library if you were there all afternoon. Should I phone her?”
“Do what you like.” He can say this because he knows the library closes at five. Now it is six. Tomorrow his mother will be too busy to remember to check his alibi.
The question is, how much does she know for sure? There are days when he thinks it’s all a guess and others when he’s convinced she knows everything. Whenever she drills him with that flat, steady stare of hers, the one that makes him feel like a bug in a bottle, Daniel asks himself, What experiment is she running on me now? There are times when it would be a relief to confess and end the awful suspense. But turning gutless wonder, breaking down and offering some snivelly, grovelly confession to clear the books with her, would be stupid if she didn’t know, really know. It would be like sticking his neck out for the axe and he didn’t fancy that at all.
So he kept on doing as he had been, but uneasily. Nearly always he signed himself on for the morning shift so that he was free to watch television with Alec in the afternoon. In the summer, during the afternoons, the local station ran pretty decent old movies, Abbott and Costello comedies, Errol Flynn swashbucklers, dusters. And on Saturdays there were the baseball games which both he and the old man loved.
Despite his grandfather’s rash of new oddities Daniel still found him easier to deal with than his mother. He hated to think what she would have to say about Alec if she could see him now, sitting in the house in a bulky knit Siwash sweater with two pairs of heavy wool socks on his feet while the mercury stood in the thermometer at 85°F. It was little wonder that his head didn’t work one hundred per cent, he was probably suffering from heat stroke, boiled brains. Whenever Daniel gave him the gears about overdressing, the old man grew sulky and grouchy. “Laugh now you little bastard,” he warned, “your turn’ll come to feel the cold.”
Although he got hostile any time Daniel teased him, it was the only way Daniel had of snapping him out of his moods. If he was sunk up to his ass in his thoughts he didn’t trouble to answer simple questions. He had to be ragged or needled into saying something. Daniel not only found the old man’s withdrawals into blankness upsetting, he also regarded them as insulting. What business had he switching off his own personal control switch to the outside world, shutting Daniel out and falling into a trance? Most often it happened when he watched television. It annoyed and aggravated Daniel to no end because when the old man came out of his reveries he demanded explanations as to how the runner came to be advanced to third base, or how Miss Kitty came to be tied to a chair in her own saloon and where the hell was Matt Dillon anyway?
Daniel would have liked to tell him to take a flying fuck at the moon if he couldn’t bother to watch the television himself. But he didn’t. He just sourly let things take their course, the old man staring glassy-eyed off into space, one hand laid like a brick on the crown of his fedora as if he feared a windstorm might erupt in his living room and tear it from his head, the barely discernible twitching of his lips signalling some hunt of the mind the way shivers and tremors in a sleeping dog’s limbs betray pursuit in a dream.
The famous hat. There was a time when his grandfather had merely forgotten to remove it indoors, now it was clear that he refused to. Daniel thinks that only a crowbar could get between the two of them and effect a separation. He remembers the day late in July he let himself into the house and discovered his grandfather dripping onto sheets of newspaper spread on the floor in front of the kitchen sink. A froth of soap suds bubbled on the mat of his thick, grizzled chest hairs and there were smears of white lather caking his flanks and thighs. He was scrubbing himself with a scrap of washcloth so hard that his private parts were flapping energetically up and down and making the occasional sideways squiggle left and right. He was absolutely naked if you didn’t count the straw hat stuck to his head. Daniel was struck dumb in the beginning. It was embarrassing to be looking at an old person, a senior citizen, without his clothes on, and it got even more unnerving when his grandfather tried to engage him in a conversation as he skidded a soap-slippery washcloth over his belly. Daniel couldn’t stop his eyes from veering back and forth between the hat and the bobbling parts, between all that limber action down below and the rock solid steadiness of the hat riding up top. With every passing second his embarrassment grew more and more acute, finally transforming itself into hysteria and nervous giggles which sent him scrambling for the living room. There he hunkered in the easy-chair, gasping out choked answers to the questions his grandfather flung at him from the kitchen, biting down hard on his knuckles to control himself during pauses in the conversation. Soon, however, the old man was roaring that he couldn’t hear him, what was he doing in there, come out and make himself understood. It was like trying to listen to a boy with a mouthful of marbles.
Somehow Daniel pulled himself together and returned to the kitchen. What he now saw didn’t strike him as funny any longer, just a sorry sight, vaguely disgusting, the white body bloated and sagging underneath a ridiculous hat. Before he could censor himself, Daniel heard himself saying, “Jesus, Alec, if you want to wash all over, whyn’t you do it like normal people and take a bath?”
And Alec said stonily, “Because I’m so goddamn old and so goddamn stiff and so goddamn fat I can hardly jack myself up out of a tub anymore. That’s why.”
Although there were sometimes awkward moments such as that, by and large the two of them got along well enough in the touchy, complaining, grudging fashion usually associated with long-married couples. Lacking any other companions their peculiar partnership had become the centre of their lives. Alec had summarily ordered his old friends, Huff and colleagues, to keep clear of his property following the uproar at Christmas and they had sulkily done so, even when they learned Vera had moved out. Also, Alec’s relations with Mr. Stutz were not quite as they once had been. The old man held himself very cool and aloof in Stutz’s presence for fear that a heated word might betray how hurt he had been by his friend and employee going behind his back to lend money to his daughter. Now all Alec’s natural mischievousness, his desire to get sober Stutz’s goat, were suppressed in case his teasing might be interpreted as bitterness or injured pride. He bit his tongue and didn’t say, “What’s this Stutz? You set on a promotion? Interested in moving from general manager to son-in-law? Interested in buying into the business?” No, following the opening of The Bluebird the two men treated each other with business-like rectitude. Nor did Mr. Stutz receive any more late-night phone calls from his employer.
Daniel was similarly isolated. Kids might say hello to him on the street but they never bothered to stop and talk. Dancing lessons had not saved him from loneliness; no girl had looked at him and imagined Montgomery Clift. On the other hand, he knew that whatever qualities he owned were not ones to endear him to the boys. He was hopeless at sports, no joker, and too proud to play Tonto to anybody’s Lone Ranger.
So that summer Daniel and Alec had their routines and each other. An hour each afternoon was spent pottering in the crazy garden which had sprouted chaotically, rows sown half with one vegetable, half with another, rows sown twice with different vegetables, a thicket of dill bristling in the potato patch because the old man had accidentally spilled a packet of seed there in the spring. Alec wouldn’t let Daniel pull it up. He said it never hurt to be reminded of your mistakes. Daniel didn’t argue. The garden was his grandfather’s business. He directed the boy in weeding, thinning, and hilling, while reserving watering rights for himself. He was never happier than when he plodded about the garden in black, high-topped rubber boots, a hose snaking after him as he sprayed the sweet peas entwined in the chicken-wire fence, doused the bald green heads of the cabbages, shook a shower over the potatoes, or sprinkled the marigolds.
Growth that summer was abundant, lush. There was really no reason to water at all except that it gave the old man pleasure. Rain was plentiful, unlike the previous year when it had been necessary to haul tanks of water from the farm. Spectacular storms often broke late on hot afternoons, black and purple thunderheads swelling on the horizon like bruises, lightning breaking open the sky in jagged, bluish-yellow cracks that spilled down a blur of wild rain and wind. Then stillness, the garden awash in water, the rain barrels foaming and swirling under the drain spouts.
The storms frequently interfered with television signals and the reception of the movie matinee. While the lightning clashed apocalyptically overhead there were arguments about unplugging the set.
“Yeah, if we unplug the set now I’ll never find out what happens. Just wait a minute. The movie’s almost over.”
“It’s over now. That goddamn aerial on the roof is no better than a lightning rod, it’ll suck the juice right out of the sky and down into the set. That’s an RCA there and I don’t want the sonofabitch fried. Unplug it.”
“What if the aerial gets hit while I’m unplugging the set? Who gets fried then?”
“If you’re worried, wear my rubber boots. Come on, quit stalling. Just unplug the sonofabitch.”
Staring intently at the screen, doggedly delaying. “You unplug it.”
“You want me to shut that set down for the Olympics? That what you want?”
“No.”
“Then unplug it. Now.”
Daniel slouched sullenly to the TV. “Jesus.”
It was a potent threat. For weeks Daniel had been anticipating the Games. Growing more and more excited as publicity and news coverage built, he was given to lecturing his grandfather, passing on with an air of sublime self-importance whatever information he had managed to glean from studies of Sport and Sports Illustrated in the magazine rack of the drugstore. It was a premeditated attempt to arouse interest in his grandfather so he wouldn’t balk at watching a bunch of foreigners competing in sports he didn’t understand and probably hadn’t even heard of. Perhaps it worked because when the Olympics finally began the old man proved to be a quick sell. He was easily as enthusiastic as his grandson, maybe more so.
For the duration of the Games their routine altered and their days rearranged themselves around the broadcast of Olympic reports. Alec greedily immersed himself in the spectacle, even insisting on watching events that Daniel had trouble considering sports at all: dressage, field hockey, European handball, race-walking, to name a few. The sorts of activities which communists excelled at, but which no self-respecting North American athlete would be caught dead doing. Daniel thought that any sport which required a man to wear tights wasn’t a sport at all and as for race-walking, that was a comedy routine.
To make matters worse, his grandfather liked to enliven their viewing by cheering for the Iron Curtain countries. Daniel knew what he was up to, but being a Russian-hater he couldn’t help getting hot under the collar when the East bloc won and was applauded by the old man. Just once he wanted to get under his skin the way his grandfather got under his. He tried. Rome was not the only scene of fierce Olympic competition. Daniel had something disparaging to say about every Soviet success.
“There goes another Ivan to get his medal for being best at some pukey sport played by about four people in the whole world. And of the other three who play the dumb sport, likely two of them are Russian anyway.”
“Magnificent athletes, the Russians,” said his grandfather.
“Whoever heard of this stuff? European handball, for chrissakes. That’s a game? And why do we have to play their sports and they don’t have to play ours? How come no baseball or football? I’d like to see how they’d do having to play a real game like baseball or football. Then we’d see.”
“Oh,” said his grandfather with maddening calmness, “give them a year or two of practice and they’d master that the way they’ve mastered everything else. Magnificent athletes, the Russians.”
They only struck a truce when it came to cheering for the Italians and Canadians; then they found themselves temporarily in the same camp. Both were downcast when Harry Jerome of Canada cramped in the semi-finals of the one hundred metres and had to hobble pitifully off the track. After that happened, despite his protestations of admiration for the Russians, the old man only really cared about the Italians. He liked the way Italians wore their hearts on their sleeves, without excuses, like kids, weeping at a loss, exulting in a victory. He even forgot his fellow-traveller pose in the welter-weight boxing final, cheering Giovanni Benvenuti’s win over the Russian Radonyak. When Berruti won the two hundred metres, stylishly insolent in sunglasses, Alec was delighted by the sight of the ecstatic Roman crowd lighting newspapers in the stands and waving them aloft to salute their hero. “Look at those crazy Italian buggers,” he said, shaking his head at the carnival, “having themselves a time like a bunch of kids.”
Today they are watching Olympic officials in white suits and white fedoras sort and organize runners for the marathon. Alec has never heard of a marathon and Daniel is passing on to him whatever he has learned from his reading of Sports Illustrated. He speaks reverently of Emil Zátopek, most famous previous winner of the 26 mile, 385 yard race. At first his grandfather refuses to believe it possible, that human beings could, or would, run such a distance, but Daniel keeps assuring him that it is true, that the spare, sinewy men with hollowed cheeks who are nervously shuffling their feet and prancing on the spot are prepared to race each other over all those punishing miles.
“This I’ve got to see,” says Alec in disbelief. “Why, that’s further than Hyacinth,” he remarks, naming a town down the line. “And why 26 miles and 385 yards? Why those extra yards? Is it because somebody once survived the 26 miles and they needed those 385 yards to finish him off? If you wanted to race horses that far the SPCA would have you up on cruelty to animal charges.”
The announcer seems to view the race in a similar light. His preamble is full of words like pain, courage, suffering, endurance. He speaks of a marathoner arriving at that stage in a race when the body’s resources are utterly depleted and the runner’s muscles, sapped, function on will alone. As he talks, the cameras sweep over the drawn, anxious faces of the race favourites, pausing briefly for a moment to dwell on an oddity, a slight, grave black man who, it is announced, has inexplicably chosen to run the marathon in bare feet. The announcer states his opinion that no matter how unaccustomed to footwear this primitive African might be – an Ethiopian in Emperor Haile Selassie’s bodyguard named Abebe Bikila – he is making a serious miscalculation choosing to run barefoot. The cobble-stoned streets of Rome that make up part of the route will be considerably less forgiving to his feet than the highland meadows around Addis Ababa where he is accustomed to train.
Yet at the six and a half mile mark of the race the Ethiopian can be found in the leading group of runners. Monkman can’t believe their pace and predicts they’ll never maintain it. “They’ll never hold it,” he says, “never.” Six miles further on Rhadi the Moroccan and the barefoot Ethiopian surge away from the pack, Rhadi in front and Bikila poised at his shoulder, running relentlessly and mechanically like a wind-up toy, bringing Daniel and his grandfather to the edge of their seats, leaning forward toward the screen. The elapsed time is announced as sixty-two minutes, thirty-nine seconds and his grandfather excitedly urges Daniel to find a pencil and paper and compute exactly how fast the two leaders are running. Daniel has never seen him this excited, crouched in his chair, hands rubbing his kneecaps, eyes welded to the television and its fleeting figures, the old man is utterly enthralled by the drama. Before Daniel completes his calculation the television reports that Rhadi and Bikila are covering one mile approximately every five minutes.
“That can’t be right. Is that right?” his grandfather demands without shifting his eyes from the TV.
Daniel gives a flick of the pencil on the sheet of paper and confirms it. “Yes,” he says, “that’s about right.”
“How do they keep going?” asks the old man softly.
At the twenty-two-mile mark Bikila spurts past the Moroccan bringing Alec out of his chair and onto his feet. Alec jabs a forefinger at the figure on the television, pumps his shoulder, “Run you black bastard!” he exults. “Run!” Stabbing his finger at the runner on the screen as if it were a prod. Daniel glances up at his grandfather and feels a slight alarm. Alec, swaying, has to reach out and steady himself with the chair back. The old man’s eyes are burning.
Now the Ethiopian is in first place and Rhadi pursuing. The camera fixes on the rigid, determined mask of Bikila’s face, sweeps down for a shot of naked feet skimming above and whispering on the pavement. Twilight lowers on the city and the little man forges on through the waning light, seemingly blind to the cheering crowds thickening along the race route. He looks to neither side, refuses blueberry juice and glucose offered from a refreshment station, simply runs on. The old man knows this is proper, this is how it must be. Bare feet and unslaked thirst.
Alec wishes he could watch the black man run forever. But Abebe crosses the finish line and the spell is broken. Then it is over for both of them. Bikila waves away the blanket race officials press on him. This too seems correct to Alec. As the tension drains from his body Bikila begins to laugh, then suddenly his laughter becomes tears and he weeps like a broken man. Monkman feels his own eyes filling. The winning time, two hours, fifteen minutes, sixteen and two-tenths seconds, is announced. The old man asks Daniel to write it down for him, carefully folds the paper the boy gives him, and slips it into his wallet, declaring to Daniel that he ought to remember this moment, they’ve just seen the toughest man in all the Olympics.
Daniel, desiring to get his own back for the Russians, says that is ridiculous. Come on, tougher than the boxers?
But the old man doesn’t trouble to answer his challenge. He seems to have slipped off in one of his trances again, wallet lying open in his lap.
In September the Games ended, leaving behind a legacy. Daniel got the idea he would turn himself into a distance runner. He had never been much good at sports but distance running appeared to him mostly a matter of training and will. All that was necessary was to harden his body until it was capable of stubbornly doing its duty. Maybe he couldn’t run fast but he might learn to run hard and long, harder and longer than the talented ones who hit and caught balls effortlessly. Best of all, he could learn to do this in secret, on his own. He took a grim, sweet delight pushing his body until it hurt and thinking of spring and track season and the surprise he would have in store for them all then. It was like a story in a boys’ book, he imagined the end of the race and Biff or Todd, somebody with that kind of name, somebody who hadn’t thought him much at all, coming up to congratulate him, saying “I didn’t think you had it in you. But say, Danny, you’re all right!”
Daniel had no real idea how to train. He simply laid out a course and, each time he ran it, tried to run it faster than the last time. Afraid of being seen and laughed at, he waited until dusk to train and took an added precaution. He ran in blue jeans rather than shorts, so if anyone noticed him he would not be a runner – only a boy happening to run.
Alec became his timer. Each night when twilight fell his grandfather packed his captain’s chair out onto the front lawn and settled himself into it with his wristwatch nestled in his palm. Daniel had asked him if it was necessary to make himself so conspicuous but the old man said, Yes, it was. If Daniel wanted an accurate timing the timer had to be exactly flush with the finish line which was the north corner of the house. He needn’t think he was going to wait on him standing, not with his legs. Consider his age.
They estimated the route to be approximately three miles. The highway which led west out of Connaught made the first side of the loop and if Daniel encountered a car approaching there, he slowed to a walk as soon as the headlights picked him up. When the car passed, he resumed running. At first he hadn’t bothered to slacken his pace when he met a vehicle but this had caused people to stop their cars and ask, Did he need assistance, had there been an accident? Answering such inquiries had been embarrassing so now he went along at a jerky, impatient walk until the coast was clear again.
A mile outside of town a grid road crossed the highway and Daniel turned left onto it. His passage down this deserted stretch of road launched a flock of mallards from a slough and flung them in relief against the sky, stroking their way across the cool, impassive disc of the risen moon. Ahead he could see the railway crossing sign standing stark before a pale horizon floating above darker, settled earth. Daniel always returned home on the railway embankment. Cinders made for a difficult footing. Panting, he slipped and lurched, torturing ankles and shins, but on the embankment there was no traffic to contend with and at this point in his run he knew that if he was forced to walk he would never be able to pick up the pace again. So he slogged on resolutely to the beads of glowing lights which spelled Connaught, and when he reached the first streetlight swerved abruptly down from the embankment, plunged recklessly down the slope in a rattle of cinders, and sped across the brightly illuminated street into the shielding darkness of the alley running behind the main street.
It was full dark at present, the shade had come down upon the window. His breath sawed rustily in his chest, his sneakers slapped noisily in the narrow passage. He ran unheeding past where the yellow brick wall carved with his uncle’s name stood obscured in darkness.
Bursting out of the throat of the alley into his grandfather’s street he knew he had only two more blocks to go. Nothing must be held back, kept in reserve now. His mouth hung slack and loose, rhythmically gasping with each jolt of his legs.
The old man waits for his grandson in the chair. He holds a flashlight on the face of the wristwatch. While waiting he thinks about the black man and the endless race. He remembers best when the black man ran entirely alone. It grew dark and soldiers lit his way, holding flaming torches in upraised hands, high above their heads. The black man went deaf past the cheering crowds, sightless past the Roman ruins, the ancient broken walls, the carved gravestones, the headless, armless statues. The torches flickered and smoked, the flames nodded and bent in his draught as he went past, blind or indifferent to the women in dark, shapeless clothes who knelt and crossed themselves to ward off suffering as it crossed their path.