The child came up the gummed trunk like a cat: Eugene rocked from the slender spiral topmost bough, exulting in his lightness, the tree’s resilient strength, and the great morning-clarion fragrant backyard world. The Alley picked his bucket with miraculous speed, skinned spryly to the ground and emptied it into the heaping pan, and was halfway up the trunk again when his gaunt mother streaked up the yard toward him.
“You, Reese,” she shrilled, “what’re you doin’hyar?” She jerked him roughly to the ground and cut across his brown legs with a switch. He howled.
“You git along home,” she ordered, giving him another cut.
She drove him along, upbraiding him in her harsh voice, cutting him sharply with the switch from moment to moment when, desperate with pride and humiliation, he slackened his retreat to a slow walk, or balked mulishly, howling again, and speeding a few paces on his short legs, when cut by the switch.
The treed boys sniggered, but Eugene, who had seen the pain upon the gaunt hard face of the woman, the furious pity of her blazing eyes, felt something open and burst stabbingly in him like an abscess.
“He left his cherries,” he said to his brother.
Or, they jeered Loney Shytle, who left a stale sharp odor as she passed, her dirty dun hair covered in a wide plumed hat, her heels out of her dirty white stockings. She had caused incestuous rivalry between her father and her brother, she bore the scar of her mother’s razor in her neck, and she walked, in her rundown shoes, with the wide stiff-legged hobble of disease.
One day as they pressed round a trapped alley boy, who backed slowly, fearfully, resentfully into a reeking wall, Willie Isaacs, the younger brother of Max, pointing with sniggering laughter, said:
“His mother takes in washin’.”
And then, almost bent double by a soaring touch of humor, he added:
“His mother takes in washin’from an ole nigger.”
Harry Tarkinton laughed hoarsely. Eugene turned away indefinitely, craned his neck convulsively, lifted one foot sharply from the ground.
