The Stories of J.F. Powers (New York Review Books Classics) Read Online Free

there were so many of them.
    Then I got scared again, only different now, empty scared all over, when they came down the hall on our floor, not stopping at anybody else’s door. And then there they were, banging on our door, of all the doors in the building. They tried to come right on in, but the door was locked.
    Old Gramma was the one locked it and she said she’d clean house if one of us kids so much as looked at the knob even, and she threw the key down her neck somewhere. I went and told her that was our door the people were pounding on and where was the key. She reached down her neck and there was the key all right. But she didn’t act much like she intended to open the door. She just stood there staring at it like it was somebody alive, saying the litany to the Blessed Virgin: Mère du Christ, priez pour nous, Secours des chrétiens, priez . . . Then all of a sudden she was crying; tears were blurry in her old yellow eyes, and she put the key in the lock, her veiny hands shaking, and unlocked the door.
    They had Mama in their arms. I forgot all about Old Gramma, but I guess she passed out. Anyway, she was on the floor and a couple of men were picking her up and a couple of women were saying, “Put her here, put her there.” I wasn’t worried as much about Old Gramma as I was about Mama.
    A bone—God, it made me sick—had poked through the flesh of Mama’s arm, all bloody like a sharp stick, and something terrible was wrong with her chest. I couldn’t look anymore and Carrie was screaming. That started me crying. Tears got in the way, but still I could see the baby, one and a half, and brother George, four and a half, and they had their eyes wide-open at what they saw and weren’t crying a bit, too young to know what the hell.
    They put Old Gramma in her room on the cot and closed the door on her and some old woman friend of hers that kept dipping a handkerchief in cold water and laying it on Old Gramma’s head. They put Mama on the bed in the room where everybody was standing around and talking lower and lower until pretty soon they were just whispering.
    Somebody came in with a doctor, a colored one, and he had a little black bag like they have in the movies. I don’t think our family ever had a doctor come to see us before. Maybe before I was born Mama and Daddy did. I heard the doctor tell Mr Purvine, that works in the same mill Daddy does, only the night shift, that he ought to set the bone, but honest to God he thought he might as well wait, as he didn’t want to hurt Mama if it wasn’t going to make any difference.
    He wasn’t nearly as brisk now with his little black bag as he had been when he came in. He touched Mama’s forehead a couple of times and it didn’t feel good to him, I guess, because he looked tired after he did it. He held his hand on the wrist of her good arm, but I couldn’t tell what this meant from his face. It mustn’t have been any worse than the forehead, or maybe his face had nothing to do with what he thought, and I was imagining all this from seeing the shape Mama was in. Finally he said, “I’ll try,” and he began calling for hot water and other things, and pretty soon Mama was all bandaged up white.
    The doctor stepped away from Mama and over to some men and women, six or seven of them now—a lot more had gone—and asked them what had happened. He didn’t ask all the questions I wanted to ask—I guess he already knew some of the answers—but I did find out Mama was on a streetcar coming home from the plant—Mama works now and we’re saving for a cranberry farm—when the riot broke out in that section. Mr Purvine said he called the mill and told Daddy to come home. But Mr Purvine said he wasn’t going to work tonight himself, the way the riot was spreading and the way the coloreds were getting the worst of it.
    “As usual,” said a man with glasses on. “The Negroes ought to organize and fight the thing to a finish.” The doctor frowned at that. Mr